Chapter Four: Hide and Seek
A week after his clandestine Mainland shipment, Paddington woke to a kick. Last night Lisa had jogged in her sleep; today she sprinted. Paddington placed a hand on her shoulder—
And Lisa woke furious, wild blue eyes inches from Paddington’s. She lunged at him and Paddington darted back, afraid she would bite off his nose. When he didn’t feel the clamp of her jaw, he peered between his fingers and found Lisa frozen, mouth open, trying to capture the last images of her nightmare.
She noticed him and lay back down. “Sorry,” she said.
“Was it the same dream as yesterday?”
“I don’t remember.”
She wouldn’t meet his gaze, so she probably did remember, but Paddington wasn’t going to press her. Instead, he shuffled over and put an arm around her. “You’re safe now,” he said. Lisa settled against him, heart hammering.
“That’s quite a blood-pumper you’ve got there,” he said, for something to say.
“Is that a euphemism?”
Paddington couldn’t return her widening smile. In his mind, she snapped at him again.
“Just an observation,” he said.
Lisa closed her eyes. Her heart kept crashing against Paddington’s chest; its pace slowed but it thumped as hard as ever.
The phone pierced his peace. With deep regret, Paddington slid a hand off Lisa and onto the bedside phone. “Yeah?”
“Missing person,” Andrea said. “Chief Conall thinks the southern station has better things to do with its time.”
“Mum, it’s my weekend off,” Paddington said.
“Is she there?”
“What does tha—”
“Doesn’t matter.” As soon as she’d heard about the computer, Andrea’s opinion of Lisa had sunken from “tolerable” to “unacceptable” and she’d moved from encouraging their relationship to sabotaging it. “I’m sure Quentin can handle it,” she said.
“No.” Paddington sat up, eyes widening. Sure, his mother was trying to get between him and Lisa – and succeeding – but this was a crime. Possibly.
“He’ll be there in ten.”
Paddington placed the handset back in the cradle and sat up, aware that Lisa had turned to stare at the ceiling. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Lisa didn’t look at him. It had been a week since Paddington had so much as mentioned Betsy’s attack and the awkward divide between them was as wide as ever. That left only one possible cause…
“Jim, were you ever going to bring it up?” she asked.
…and there it was.
She said it so calmly Paddington thought he imagined it.
“No,” he admitted.
“Your mother came to talk to me,” Lisa said. “Said you closed yourself off after I left.”
Explanations formed in Paddington’s mind, all the reasons why he’d become what he was, but they’d sound ridiculous out loud. “It’s better this way,” he said at last.
“It really meant that much to you?”
Paddington stared out the window at the bright blue sky, stomach knotting. Could he explain himself, even fifteen years later? Was any reason good enough?
“Then you should know that I didn’t leave Archi just because of you,” Lisa said.
Mitigating factors didn’t matter; he was the primary cause. He drove her away.
“Why did you come back?” he asked.
Lisa lay at ease, eyes closed. “Why didn’t you leave?”
“Nah. You’ve seen me fumbling at the computer; how would I fare out there?” he asked. “Little people, little problems, maybe that’s all I’m good for.”
Paddington’s brown eyes searched Lisa’s face for somewhere safe to land. They dodged enemy fire before being shot down. There were flames.
“All right, I’m a coward,” Paddington said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Lisa smiled. “I’m not saying anything.”
“No, you’re just lying there, silently insinuating.”
She sat forward until her lips were an inch from his. “And I’ll… insinuate all I want.”
“No! No time for insinuations now. Quentin’s already on his way.” Paddington jumped out of bed, showered, and dressed in his black uniform. As he was starting breakfast, Lisa emerged, still in her night-slip and smoothing wild blonde hair.
Why had he said yes to working? Why not spend the day with Lisa? What would it matter if he didn’t find one missing person?
There was a knock at the door and, immediately, the sound of it opening. Quentin rumbled along the passage, belt jingling. Lisa made no effort to cover herself up.
“Heya Jim… Lisa.” He tipped his helmet at her and dropped a folder on the table, imbuing the act with distaste for everything the southern station was and did.
Paddington kissed Lisa goodbye and grabbed his helmet. As Quentin drove them south, Paddington peeled open the case report. “Norman Winslow. Never heard of him.”
“Lucky you.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
The streets became grimier, as though brooms didn’t work so well the farther south they went, or roofs were more difficult to repair. The houses were new, too; none more than eighty years old. The south had never really recovered from some big fire a while back; it had just limped along, only half alive.
They parked and approached Winslow’s workplace, a dull building that was, inside, one large room filled with ten cheap desks. The floor undulated where the structure had been extended and the walls were three shades of dull orange. Seven people looked up when they entered.
After a brief conversation with Winslow’s boss – a heavyset man who hadn’t seen Winslow in a month, assumed that he was using his accumulated holiday time, and only reported Winslow missing so he could replace him – they spoke with the staff. None had seen him since Monday the second of April, twenty-six days ago. Winslow’s ridiculously-neat desk completely lacked a convenient note saying “Starting one-month vacation tomorrow”. Still, maybe that made this proper police work: someone was missing and Paddington could be his only hope, a possibility highlighted when Quentin kissed the hand of the woman he was supposed to be questioning.
“Got anything?” Paddington asked.
“Just a date on Friday!” Quentin whispered.
“What about Denise? And Rose?”
“I won’t tell them if you don’t,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows.
Paddington would have lectured him on the merits of monogamy, but Quentin didn’t need relationship advice. He was charismatic enough to get away with anything. Hell, if Paddington told Denise about Rose, Quentin would probably just introduce them. And they’d become best friends.
“Let’s try his house,” Paddington said.
Winslow’s house was only a few minutes’ walk away, during which Quentin made small talk about how nice it must be to be out in the sunshine instead of trapped inside the interweb.
They found Winslow’s house unlocked and his housekeeping obsessive. The books on the coffee table were parallel to its edge. There were no discarded clothes or scraps of rubbish or signs of human laziness. Winslow’s couch clearly knew what Proper Conduct was and would not tolerate any filthy romantic behaviour on its pristine surfaces. Not that there was much danger of that.
“What a tosser,” Quentin summarised.
Paddington checked the bedroom. The single bed had been made, the wardrobe contained labelled clothes set in neat rows, and there was barely any dust, even after a month.
Quentin opened the fridge. “Bit smelly in here,” he said. He upended a carton of milk. Something slurped, but nothing fell. He put it back.
Paddington found a calendar on the side of the fridge. The photo was of a couple on east beach at sunset; not Norm. “On the second of April he’s pencilled – very neatly – ‘Dinner with dad’.”
“Let’s off then,” Quentin said, heading for the door.
?
??What about gathering clues?”
“They’ve been waiting a month, what’s another half hour?”
Paddington followed Quentin out into unfamiliar streets. He didn’t usually come this far down; the southern station handled all the crime south of the city garden – though apparently they didn’t want to deal with Winslow.
Quentin knocked on Samuel Winslow’s front door and, when there was no answer, pushed it open. Despite ample sunshine, the lights were on inside. A reek of rotting meat escaped the kitchen, so Paddington left Quentin to investigate that and checked the den, which was empty. They called Norm and Samuel’s names as they went, but the house was abandoned. There was no sign of a struggle, no forced entry; a genuine mystery.
Interest piqued, Paddington didn’t feel as bad about deserting Lisa.
He spotted an open door and went through it into the small cellar. Wine racks reached floor-to-ceiling and the cool air smelled of dirt and mould. Paddington reached the third wooden step before his breakfast burned out of his throat.
At the foot of the stairs were two corpses, their skin like cobwebs over muscle and bone. Maggots coated the bodies. Paddington covered his mouth, ready to remove his hand if last night’s dinner also made a bid for freedom.
There was a severed arm halfway down the stairs, which he stepped over, then stopped above the bodies. Neither was missing an arm. Both were missing their heads, though…
Was this some bizarre suicide club? A shotgun lay near the bodies. One was female; not a Winslow. Why hadn’t she been reported missing? And if the headless man was one of the Winslows, where was the other?
Paddington looked around, partly for more clues but mostly to avoid looking at the corpses. The nearby wine ledger’s open page was filled with scrawled writing that increased in size and messiness as it went on.
It is 11:58 on April 2nd. My name is Norman Winslow. I am 47 years old and I have just been bitten by a woman who looks like a corpse. My father says I am now a zombie, so I have decided to document my experiences.
She bit my neck, but it doesn’t hurt. The skin around it is completely numb.
I wish I’d done something with my life.
Losing control. Dad’s right. Not concerned.
Legs sway. Can’t close mouth. Can talk.
HELP
Movement, behind! Paddington spun, fumbling with his pistol’s release strap. Why did they make these things so hard to undo? If that was the zombie, he was wasting seconds he might not have!
The mental images of reeking death, living corpses, and stumbling figures flashing through his mind did nothing to still his shaking hands.
Paddington risked a glance up and saw not a zombie, but Quentin being violently ill. Paddington released his gun, grabbed his flashlight, and did a sweep of the cellar. Lots of wine. Some tinned food. Blood. Two corpses. One arm. No hiding zombies, not that he wanted to double-check. He grabbed the ledger and led Quentin outside. As Quentin read Norman Winslow’s final words, Paddington swallowed the lump in his throat and radioed.
“Unit thirty-eight to control.”
“Found him, James?” Andrea asked.
“Bits of him.” Paddington felt sick, but nothing came out. “Mum, you’d better get over here, to Samuel Winslow’s. We’ve, uh… got zombies.”
“Right-o,” his mother said. Why didn’t she sound surprised? Yes, she usually thought three steps ahead, but how could she know there’d be zombies? “Be there in thirty.”
Paddington and Quentin decided by unspoken agreement that the best course of action was to secure the crime scene from contamination. This manifested itself as sitting on the front porch and staring at a sycamore tree and trying not to think.
Andrea parked her hatchback and climbed out, a shotgun in her hands and the Bretherton Sabre strapped to her left hip. A family heirloom, in emergencies it could also function as three feet of very sharp steel. “Where are they?” she asked.
“There’s two bodies in the cellar,” Paddington said, desperately not picturing their missing faces.
“Nothing alive?” Andrea asked. “Or… moving?”
“Why aren’t you freaking out?” Paddington yelled. Quentin managed a distant nod.
“Why are you?” Andrea touched her son’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “Your grandpa always used to talk about the Night of the Realive, when the dead had tried to overrun the living, remember?”
“I thought he was just telling stories to amuse me!”
“What better story than a true one?” Andrea asked. She pumped a cartridge into the shotgun’s chamber. “Now, show me the bodies.”
“You don’t want to see them,” he said. There were birds in that tree. How could they sing on a day like this?
“Constable!”
Paddington tore his gaze from the birds to his mother. She waited until his eyes stopped flicking away and were focussed solely on her, then said, “Show me the bodies, James.” Downstairs, she added, “That’ll be Samuel. Too old for Norman. As for the girl, I don’t know. Any thoughts?” When none came, she shouted, “James!”
The cellar’s rough wooden steps were warm beneath him. Paddington risked a glance at the bodies, but he had nothing left to bring up. After a moment he looked back, then away, then back at the corpse again. Eventually he managed to see the shape beneath the worms.
“Could be Marion Valdis,” he said. “Right height. Timing fits, too: she went missing a week before Norm. I thought her boyfriend Ian killed her and disposed of the body.”
“Based on what evidence?” Andrea asked.
“We couldn’t find her.” Admittedly, it sounded weak phrased like that. “They’d been going out, she dumped him, Ian asked her over, and… she disappeared.”
“She just reappeared.” Andrea knelt by the bodies. “So what happened here? James! With me, now!”
Before he realised it, Paddington was standing over the bodies. “Impact is upward,” he said. “Indicates Samuel’s shooter was on a lower step.”
“And her?”
Paddington told himself it was a game. A test. A challenge. Above all, it wasn’t real.
“Whole head’s missing,” Paddington said. “Downward angle. Maybe Samuel shot her, then himself. No, that doesn’t make sense.” He was forgetting something… “Of course! Norman Winslow!”
His mother blinked. “Good, yes.”
Paddington pointed. “She bites him, he writes the journal entry, Samuel hears the attack, kills her, but doesn’t realise that Norman’s been infected. There’s a struggle, Norman’s on a lower step, gun goes off – bang! – Samuel dies.”
Samuel dies…
That thought broke through the game and reality struck him again. Two people were dead. Three, if you included the zombie of Norman Winslow that was still out there somewhere.
“This is more than a missing person,” Andrea said, “so Conall can deal with it. You two, write your reports then go home. Take Monday off. Conall shouldn’t have offloaded this on us to begin with.”
She wanted him to give up on this? “But—”
“James, please,” Andrea said.
Paddington and Quentin made it back to the station without a single word and with barely a thought. Paddington typed his report, placed it on his mother’s desk, then stopped at Quentin’s. “Are you okay?”
“Just like cows, innit?” He’d doodled a cow on his paper and traced its outline several times. Its left foreleg was severed and lying beside it on a set of stairs.
“Finish up. We’ll go down the pub,” Paddington said.
“You hate the pub.”
“Come on.”
An hour later, they ordered lunch in the Bleeding Heck. They didn’t eat, but it was comforting to have food in front of them. For once, Paddington found comfort in having others around him. The few scattered regulars – including one pastor, not that either of them were in the mood for drunken religion – reassured them that the world hadn’t really ended. Yet.
?
??You boys look glum,” Harold Brown said. “Anything I can do?”
“More beer,” Paddington said.
“You sure, Jim? Imbribe any more and you’ll likely end up on the floor.”
“More beer,” Quentin agreed.
Harold poured another couple and set them on the bar.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Paddington asked, when Harold was far away.
“What is there to say?” Quentin asked.
“Yeah,” was the only thing Paddington could think of, and it took him a while to get that far. The less said about it the better. No wonder no one ever talked about the last outbreak. Talking made it real. Much better to let it fade… pretend it had never happened.
Paddington bit the end off a warm chip and chewed it longer than was necessary.
“Call for you,” Harold said, placing a phone on the bar in front of Paddington.
Swallowing cold chip mush, Paddington took the handset. “Hello?”
“Good morning, constable,” said a deep, smooth voice. “This is Duke Adonis Andraste.”
Paddington leapt off his stool and to attention, which pulled the phone off the bar and onto his feet. He tried very hard not to swear.
“Are you all right, constable?” asked the duke.
Paddington tried to keep the pain out of his voice. Damn that phone was heavy. “Fine sir, yes sir, thank you sir,”
“I’d like you to come to the manor for dinner tonight.”
After taking a second to confirm his ears were working, Paddington said, “Of course, your grace, I’d be delighted.”
“Then I shall see you and Miss Tanner at eight o’clock.” The line clicked and Paddington picked the phone’s torso off the floor and put it gently on the bar.
“Was that who I think it was?” Quentin asked, with awe. Paddington nodded numbly. Most people went their whole lives without talking to the duke; he’d just been invited to dinner.
Harold pushed a shot glass of amber liquid at him. “Get that inta yeh,” Harold said.
More alcohol didn’t seem like a good idea. “I think I’ll just go home.”
“Good thinking,” Quentin said, pulling Paddington’s drinks toward him. “You go get ready. I’ll finish these.”