Zom-B Mission (7 page)

The dog bolts and everyone glares at me.

‘What did you do that for?’ Ashtat cries.

‘I don’t like dogs,’ I lie.

‘Even so, you didn’t have to scare it off,’ Ashtat pouts. ‘I think we could have persuaded it to come to us. You could have simply stood back.’

‘There was blood on its fur,’ I improvise. ‘It might have been zombie blood. It could have infected Emma and Declan.’

Ashtat frowns and considers that. As she’s thinking it over, the door to the building opens behind us and someone calls out chirpily, ‘I knew that was B Smith even before I heard your voice. I recognised the smell.’

We whirl round. The others squint at the dark-skinned stranger on the steps, not sure what to make of his unexpected greeting. But he’s no stranger to me, and as he stands
there smirking, I take a trembling step forward and croak his name with disbelief.

‘
Vinyl?
’

ELEVEN

Vinyl was my best friend back when I was a normal girl. We’d been friends since we were toddlers. Being a racist, my dad forbade me from having anything to do with black kids. But in that one instance I disobeyed him. I pretended to blank Vinyl, but I’d see him behind Dad’s back. I knew Dad would beat the crap out of me if he ever found out, but I liked Vinyl too much to drive
him away.

Vinyl was brighter than the rest of us. He got upgraded to a better school when his mum made him sit a Mensa test and his potential was uncovered. I’m sure he would have stopped hanging out with me after another month or two, and that would have been the end of our friendship. But he was still one of the gang the day before the zombie attacks, when I last spoke to him on the
phone.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I ask once we’re safely inside the building and the door has been locked.

‘I’m your guide,’ he says as if it’s the most ordinary thing in the world. ‘I’m here to lead you guys to New Kirkham. That’s the name of the compound.’

‘But how did you get here? How did you survive and end up doing a job like this?’

‘I’ll explain it all shortly,’
Vinyl says, cool as ever. ‘Come and meet the rest of the group first. We’re not moving out until morning, so we have all of the afternoon and night to chat.’

He leads us through to a massive atrium, nothing over our heads except the roof high above. You can see all of the floors from here, the offices set just behind the outer corridors.

Eight humans wait in the centre of the atrium, three men, two women, a couple of teenagers and a girl about Declan’s age. They look nervous. There are also a pair of Angels, Pearse and Conall, sitting slightly apart from the humans, playing cards. Rage hails the Angels and trots over to join their game.

‘Pearse and Conall came with me from New Kirkham,’ Vinyl says. ‘Dr Oystein
likes us to team up with his Angels for operations like this.’

‘You know Dr Oystein?’ I ask, head still spinning.

‘Haven’t met him. Heard lots about him from Mr Burke.’

‘Burke?’ If the blood could drain from my face, it would.

Before I can ask any more questions, we’re welcomed by the humans we’ve come to escort. They’re scared of us, that’s clear, but do their best to hide it.
They invite us to eat with them, but Ashtat explains that we don’t need food.

The little girl asks Declan if he wants to play. He shakes his head and clings to his mum. Emma laughs and slots in with the other living people, telling Declan he has nothing to be afraid of, unconsciously turning her back on us and abandoning us for those more like herself, which is understandable.

The
little girl pesters Declan, urging him to play with her. Vinyl smiles and whispers to me, ‘That’s Liz. She’s an orphan and hasn’t had any other children to play with for as long as she’s been with the group. I don’t think she’ll take no for an answer.’

As Liz keeps plugging away at a scared-looking Declan, some of the survivors take us on a tour of the building and tell us how they holed
up here not long after the zombies attacked. They took on the undead with knives, heavy office equipment and crudely fashioned spears, fighting them for the right to call this place home.

Once they’ve shown us around, they leave us in the atrium and go to celebrate their final night here and ready themselves for the journey. I gather that a few of them would rather stay, but they voted
and the majority were in favour of heading for pastures less confining.

Ashtat, Carl, Shane and Jakob join Rage and the other Angels. Vinyl and I slip away by ourselves and wind up in the canteen.

‘It’s been a long time,’ Vinyl notes softly, taking a chair and opening a bottle of orange juice.

‘Looks like it’s been longer for you than me,’ I grunt. I haven’t aged since my heart was
ripped from my chest, but Vinyl looks about five years older. Life has taken its toll on him.

‘You look pretty much the way I remember you,’ Vinyl says. ‘Except for the obvious differences.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say sweetly, smoothing back the wisps of moss which surround the hole where my heart used to be.

‘That’s got to hurt, hasn’t it?’ he asks.

‘Not
as much as you’d think. We don’t feel pain the same way that we did when we were alive. It stings all the time, but I’m not in agony.’

Vinyl stares at me sadly.

‘Stuff your sympathy where the sun don’t shine,’ I snap. ‘I don’t need it and I sure as hell don’t want it.’

‘Death hasn’t mellowed you,’ Vinyl laughs.

‘Damn straight,’ I huff. ‘I’m grumpier than ever, and I have fangs
now, so don’t get on the wrong side of me.’

Vinyl shakes his head happily. ‘I’ve missed you, B.’

‘I’ve missed you too,’ I mutter, then lean forward, but not too close, wary as I always am around the living, not wanting to accidentally infect him. ‘Any idea what happened to my mum and dad?’

Vinyl sighs. ‘No. I haven’t seen them. Sorry.’

‘Did your parents get out?’

‘No,’ he
whispers and his jaw trembles slightly.

‘What about the old gang, Stagger Lee, Trev, Meths. Any of them make it?’

‘None that I know of.’ He shrugs. ‘But there are lots of compounds. People got scattered all over the place. How about you? Do you know anyone who survived?’

‘Only Mr Burke. And maybe Mrs Reed, kind of.’

I tell Vinyl about that last day in school, listing our friends
who perished, at least those I can remember—I think I’ve forgotten one or two names, strange as that seems. I also tell him about the teachers who were killed, the students who got away with my dad, and how Mrs Reed became some sort of brain-eating cross between a zombie and a human.

‘You’re pulling my leg,’ he snorts.

‘I’m not.’

He scratches his head. ‘But if she wasn’t a proper
zombie, what was she then?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about her in ages. I remember clocking it at the time, thinking it was weird, but too much has happened since for me to follow it up. Not that I could, even if I wanted to. I don’t know what happened to her, if she got out, where she might be.’

‘Maybe she’s still in our old school. She could be teaching zombies these days.
B is for Brains
,’ he says, mimicking her voice.

‘Don’t be an arse,’ I grin, but my smile fades as I tell him about Tyler Bayor and how I let my dad turn me into something even lower than a slug.

Vinyl is grim-faced when I finish. He looks at me harshly. ‘Tyler was solid,’ he says gruffly.

‘I know,’ I croak.

‘He didn’t deserve that.’

‘No.’

‘I warned you about what would happen,
didn’t I? I said you had to stand up to your dad, that you’d turn out as bad as him if you didn’t.’

‘I don’t think you ever put it quite like that,’ I growl.

‘I came pretty damn close,’ he says. ‘The only thing that stopped me being that blunt was that I knew how angry you got when anyone said anything bad about your father.’

‘Yeah, well, that was before I saw him in all his glory.
I’m not standing up for him now, am I?’

Vinyl frowns. ‘You really ran back into the school instead of leaving with him and going your own way later?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That was dumb, wasn’t it?’

I laugh and stretch out my right hand to knock knuckles. Then I remember that I’m a zombie who can’t touch him, and settle for a cheesy thumbs up.

TWELVE

I tell Vinyl about my life since I was killed. The bit he enjoys most is when I describe climbing the London Eye.

‘You really scaled it using just your hands?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Wicked.’

When I’m done, it’s Vinyl’s turn. He was at his new school the day of the attacks. By luck he was outside for a phys-ed class when the world went haywire. He fled with some of his classmates,
then headed home. He couldn’t find his mum and dad.

‘So maybe they’re alive, in another compound,’ I suggest.

‘Nah,’ he says sadly. ‘I met a neighbour of ours a few months later. He saw them get killed. He said both were properly slaughtered, their brains ripped out, so at least I don’t have to worry about them stumbling around in a monstrous state.’

Vinyl survived that first night
by locking himself into a bank vault.

‘You what?’ I hoot.

‘I figured a bank would be as safe a place as any,’ he grins. ‘The vaults are operated by time locks. As long as we could keep out the zombies until the vaults were due to shut, we could slip inside and they wouldn’t be able to get at us.’

‘You were always oozing with brains,’ I mutter.

‘Yeah, baby,’ he crows. ‘I’d be
a prize scalp for one of your crowd.’

Vinyl found refuge in one of our local banks, spent that first night locked up nice and tight – he says he slept on a bed of banknotes that must have been worth a million pounds, but I think he’s making that bit up – then struck out for the countryside in the morning.

‘Most of the people in the bank stayed behind,’ he snorts. ‘They thought the army
would rescue them. I figured there wasn’t a hope of that. When a city like London falls, there’s no quick recovery.’

Vinyl roughed it for a few weeks in the country, avoiding contact with anyone. Then he stumbled across one of the first compounds to be set up and threw in his lot with them.

‘It fell less than a week later,’ he sighs. ‘We underestimated the sheer bloody determination
of the undead. They kept coming and coming. They wore us down, picked holes in our barriers, and next thing we knew they were swarming the place.’

He made it out with a few others and went looking for another compound. He found New Kirkham – though it didn’t have a name then – and he’s been there ever since, only leaving it at times like this, to guide other humans to sanctuary.

‘I
got closely involved in the running of the place,’ he says. ‘Age doesn’t matter any more. Qualifications are irrelevant. It all boils down to what you know and how you operate under pressure. I’d learnt a lot of lessons from the collapse of the first compound and I was able to make suggestions to shore up our defences.’

‘So you’re a Big Chief now?’ I grin. ‘Power, a throne, a harem?’

‘Yeah,’ he deadpans. ‘A gold-rimmed toilet, caviar for breakfast, the works.’

The army rolled by a month or so after Vinyl had arrived in New Kirkham. They wanted to put their stamp on the place, but the residents were happy with things the way they were. They rejected the offer of help and have remained one of the few truly independent mainland compounds.

‘Were the soldiers pissed?’
I ask.

He shrugs. ‘They thought we were fools, but they left us in peace. Told us not to come crying to them when it all broke down. But so far it hasn’t.’

One day, out of the blue, Billy Burke came calling. He was with a group of survivors. He’d led them out of London with the help of a few Angels. The newcomers were accepted gratefully—there’s plenty of space in the compound, so the
locals are happy to admit stragglers as long as they’re willing to toe the line and work hard.

‘Burke asked for volunteers to come back with the Angels and act as guides for future groups,’ Vinyl says. ‘A lot of the survivors in London don’t trust the Angels. They’re more likely to accept an invitation of help if someone living is involved.’