Zom-B Mission (9 page)

‘Play,’ he says stubbornly. He was the most obedient boy I’ve ever seen up until this, but now that Liz has lured him out of his shell, he’s become more like other children his age.

‘What’s wrong?’ Vinyl asks, as others start to pay attention.

‘The bird,’ I explain. ‘There was blood on its feathers. A
drop hit Liz. It might be blood from an animal or a corpse, but it could also be from –’

Liz screams before I can finish. It’s a very specific type of scream, one I’ve heard lots of times before, one I had hoped never to hear again.

‘Jump, Declan!’ I roar, turning to Vinyl and Emma. ‘Catch him,’ I bark as I run to the tree and climb the trunk.

Vinyl and Emma realise what is happening
and they start shouting at Declan to jump, holding out their arms, promising to catch him. But the boy has frozen. He stares at the people on the ground – others are shouting at him too now – then at Liz, who is shuddering and frothing, shaking as she clings to the tree, eyes rolling madly in their sockets.

Scared by all the activity, the bird abandons the crust of bread and flies away, but the damage has already been done, and I curse the innocent creature as it takes to the sky and swiftly disappears from sight.

Reaching the two children, I wrap my arms round Liz and hold her as still as I can. Declan is looking at me with wide eyes. His cheeks are pale and he’s trembling.

‘Go,’ I tell him.

Declan shakes his head and whispers, ‘Liz?’

‘Go!’ I shout and bare my fangs to shock him into action. The tactic works and Declan hurls himself from the tree with a frightened shriek. Vinyl and Emma catch him between them, then Emma buries his face in her chest and rushes away with him as the other humans and Angels press closer to the tree. Many of the people are crying.

‘Liz,’ a woman moans, but nobody else says her name or pleads with me to stop. They know what has happened and they know what has to be done.

As Liz shudders and undergoes the change from a living girl to an undead monstrosity, I quickly check her legs and arms for any evidence of a c-shaped scar. If she has been vaccinated by Dr Oystein’s team, one of us can escort her back to County
Hall, in case she revitalises later.

But there’s no scar. The girl is without hope. If I let this run its natural course, she will become a brain-dead revived, with no chance of ever regaining her senses.

‘Get everyone away from here,’ I tell Vinyl. ‘They don’t need to see this. And I don’t want any of them to get splattered by her blood.’

‘Come on,’ Vinyl says, and quickly shepherds
the survivors away. The Angels remain, grim-faced but supportive.

‘Do you want me to do it?’ Rage asks. ‘I know you’re sensitive when children are involved.’

‘There’s no room for sensitivity in this world,’ I say sadly.

And then, before Liz has completed her awful evolution, before bones force their way out through her fingertips and her teeth lengthen into fangs, I press her skull
against the tree trunk, make a fist, and release the unfortunate orphan from the horror.

FOURTEEN

We bury Liz in a deep grave and the humans say some prayers over it. I don’t hang around to listen. I spend the time wiping my hands through the grass, over and over, cleaning them of every last horrible stain. The others leave me be. Each one of them knows what this is like. We’ve all executed a zombie like Liz before, some of them even younger than she was. There’s nothing
you can say at a time like this. Liz was a doomed killer, but she was also a little girl, and while I know I had to do what I did, I still feel absolutely wretched, and will for a long time to come.

We press on once the living are done praying. We march in solemn silence, the survivors glancing at us bitterly every so often. I know what they’re thinking—
If we’d stayed in Hammersmith, Liz would be alive now
. And they’re right. That’s what makes it so hard to bear. We’re trying to do good here, but a little girl is dead because of our interference. There’s no getting away from that.

We reach the safe house and settle down for the night, the humans in a few of the rooms, the Angels in another. I sit in a corner by myself, lost in thought. Vinyl enters at one point, to try
and comfort me, but I just shake my head at him and he leaves without saying anything.

In the morning, while the living are having a quick breakfast, Ashtat approaches me. ‘Will you be OK?’ she asks.

‘As much as I can be,’ I sigh.

‘We can send you back to County Hall if you prefer.’

‘No, I’d rather stick with the mission. It’ll be easier not to think about it if I can keep busy.’

She nods. ‘As you wish.’ She hesitates, then decides to press on. ‘You were the only one who saw the blood strike her. If you had not reacted as fast as you did, she might have infected Declan before we could get to them.’

‘I know. But still . . .’

‘Yes,’ Ashtat says. ‘Still . . .’

She offers me a brief, weary smile, then goes to check on the humans. I spend a few more minutes
thinking about Liz, then put the morbid thoughts behind me and crack on with the job at hand. There’s never much time for reflection these days. You roll with the punches or you fall to the ground and weep until the flesh drops from your bones. There’s no place in between.

The sleep has done the living good, and although the loss of Liz has scarred them, they do their best to soldier on
as if nothing has happened. They’re excited about the prospect of finding safe haven in New Kirkham, and we have to keep reminding them not to talk to one another. They want to discuss their new home and what life will be like once they’ve settled in, if they’ll find any friends or family members among the townsfolk. We’re only concerned with getting them there alive and well. We don’t believe
in looking too far ahead.

Finally, shortly before midday, we crest a hill and spot New Kirkham. It’s a converted town. The people who decided to turn it into a base built several tall, steel-plated walls round the perimeter, topped with spikes and barbed wire. There are small platforms situated along the walls at regular intervals, manned by guards with guns, flame-throwers and whatever
other weapons they’ve managed to scavenge.

Thousands of zombies mill around the compound. They scratch at the walls, snarl at the guards, leap at the spikes.

The humans among us gasp at the sight of the beleaguered town. A couple cross themselves.

‘Why the hell have you brought us here?’ one of the men growls angrily.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Vinyl says.

‘You’re kidding
me,’ the man retorts. ‘That’s a disaster waiting to happen. You think we’re going to lock ourselves into a death trap like that? We were a million times better off where we were. Take us back to London.’

‘We can if you want,’ Vinyl shrugs. ‘We’re not gonna force you to stay. But I suggest you enter with us and have a look round before you decide. This is one of the safest places in the
country. We’ve studied the zombies. We know their strengths and limits, and built the walls to those specifications. They can’t punch through. They can’t leap over or climb them. They can’t dig under them. We keep watch on the living dead every minute of the day and night, from every angle. I’m not saying our barriers are impenetrable – only a fool makes those sorts of boasts – but in all my
months here, not a single zombie has breached our defences.’

‘But if they did break through?’ Emma asks, clutching Declan close—he’s retreated into his customary silent shell since the incident with Liz yesterday, and I think it will be a long time before he comes out of it again.

‘There are escape tunnels,’ Vinyl says. ‘Nine already dug, six more under construction. They run for hundreds
of metres deep underground and open up far from the sight of any nearby zombies.

‘We grow our own crops,’ Vinyl continues, pointing to tilled plots within the walls. ‘There are two wells. We also grow crops elsewhere and transport them in through the tunnels, along with other supplies which we forage for. But if the worst came to pass, and we got penned in, we could survive on what we
harvest inside.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ Carl mutters, ‘is why your guards aren’t picking off targets. There are thousands of zombies lined up outside the walls. Why don’t you shoot them all?’

‘Other survivors made that mistake,’ Vinyl says grimly. ‘We did too, at the compound we established before New Kirkham. It seemed so easy—the zombies came in their masses, we picked them off
with ease, we thought we could keep going indefinitely. We planned to rid England of tens of thousands of zombies all by ourselves.

‘The first problem we encountered made us wary, but wasn’t enough to merit a change of plan. Lots of corpses create mounds. Other zombies can use those as springboards to leap the walls. You’d have to build a wall several storeys high to stop them getting over,
or else go out regularly in some sort of armoured bulldozer to clear the stacks of corpses.

‘We might have explored those possibilities in greater detail, but then we hit the second problem and that was the real killer—the insects. No wall in the world can be built high enough to keep those buggers out.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I frown.

‘Insects aren’t especially attracted
to mobile zombies,’ he explains. ‘They don’t draw much distinction between the living and the undead. But if I fired a bullet through your head . . .’ he cocks a finger and pretends to shoot me ‘. . . your corpse would start to break down. Flies, maggots and other creepy-crawlies would rush to gorge themselves on your gooey remains. Rats and mice would burrow through your flesh. Birds and bats
would pick at you. All sorts of creatures would feast on you until they’d nibbled you down to the bone, however long that might take.

‘The thing we fear more than anything else is infection,’ Vinyl says quietly. ‘Like we saw yesterday, with Liz. We can deal with direct assaults. But insects, rodents and birds can spread the undead disease too. A fly could be eating its fill on a zombie
corpse. Some blood sticks to its legs. It buzzes over the wall into New Kirkham, looking for fresh pickings. Settles on someone’s lips while they’re asleep. The blood rubs off. The person transforms. Trouble in paradise.

‘Now a single fly and a lone zombie on the loose aren’t that big a deal. Again, yesterday’s tragedy with Liz shows that we can limit the damage when it’s an isolated incident.
But millions of flies, feasting on thousands of zombie corpses, drifting our way on a nice cool breeze . . . That would be the end of life as we know it.’

‘So you don’t dare kill the zombies?’ I ask.

‘Not loads of them,’ he says. ‘Others have tried, and their compounds fell. If there were less of them, we could mow them down, cart them off and burn them somewhere distant. But there are
too many, and more coming all the time. So we leave them be, let them pound on the walls and circle the compound endlessly. The noise is a pain, especially when hundreds of them howl at the same time – that usually happens a few times a day, thankfully never for more than a couple of minutes – but you start to tune it out after a while.’

Vinyl turns to face the Hammersmith posse. ‘I’m not
trying to con you. Life is hard here, but easier than it is most places. We’re experienced and wily. We haven’t survived this long just by luck. We know a lot about zombies and we’re constantly studying them, finding out new information, using that against them.

‘We’re also more liberal than in other camps. You’ll be treated fairly. We share food and water equally. In some places the leaders
and soldiers get more. That isn’t the case in New Kirkham. We have regular meetings to decide the laws we’re gonna live by. Anyone can run for office and you can be voted out at any time. We make use of people’s strengths – if you’re an architect, we’ll ask you to work on new buildings, if you’re a farmer, we’ll ask you to help with the crops – but we don’t force anyone to do anything.’

Rage grunts cynically. ‘It sounds like Utopia.’

Vinyl nods. ‘Except for the threat of the zombies, it is. I don’t know if we can keep it that way forever, but at the moment it’s pretty sweet. Everyone’s united, working towards the same goal, for the good of the majority. In a way I’m almost glad the apocalypse happened, because I’d never have got to experience a place like this if it
hadn’t.’

‘You make it sound enticing,’ Emma says, smiling nervously.

‘Come and check it out,’ Vinyl says. ‘If I’m lying, or if you don’t like the look of the set-up, you’re free to leave and we’ll escort you back to Hammersmith.’

‘Is that true?’ Emma asks Carl, trusting him more than Vinyl, having spent the past few months in County Hall.

Carl nods. ‘We’re here to do whatever
you want. If that means taking you back to Hammersmith or somewhere else, so be it. We won’t abandon you. You have our word.’

‘OK,’ Emma sighs. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

‘Excellent,’ Vinyl beams. ‘And the rest of you?’ The humans look uneasy, but they all nod grudgingly. ‘You won’t regret it,’ Vinyl tells them. ‘This is the best decision you’ll ever make.’

I wince at that – it’s like
he’s personally inviting Lady Luck to strike us down on the spot – but Vinyl winks at me and mouths the words, ‘Have faith.’ And because he looks so confident and cocky, like the Vinyl of old, I find myself trusting him, the same as the others.