“Why did you kill him?” Cathy groans, staring, nauseated, at the motionless scientist. “He was trying to help us.”
“So that he could experiment on us some more?” Rage huffs. “Screw that.”
“But you were always their favorite,” Tiberius notes. “You did everything they asked. Their golden boy.”
“Yeah,” Rage says. “And they fell for it.” He savagely kicks the corpse of Dr. Cerveris. “I’ve hated these bastards since day one. No one locks me up like a lab rat and gets away with it. But there was no point hitting out at them when they had the upper hand. So I waited. I had a feeling something like this would happen, that things would break down and an opportunity would present itself. I didn’t think it’d be as spectacular as this, but I was sure there’d be a bit of give somewhere along the line.”
Rage looks at Reilly and cocks his head. “You still here?”
“I didn’t think I was free to go,” Reilly says shakily.
“Well, you are.” Rage shrugs. “You weren’t the worst of them. That doesn’t mean I won’t kill you if I have to, but at the moment you’re not a threat to me, so be a sensible boy and bugger off.”
“What about my gun?” Reilly asks.
“Do I look like an idiot?” Rage snorts. “You’d put a bullet through my skull the second I gave it back to you. I’m sure you’ll pick up something in one of the ammo rooms. If you make it that far.”
Reilly looks at the rest of us for support, but nobody says anything. “Fine,” he grunts. “Damn you all too.”
He takes off at top speed, desperately searching for something to defend himself with.
I focus on Rage and the gun in his hand. Rage stares back at me, then casts his gaze over the other zom heads. For a moment I think he’s going to drop us all. But then he lowers the gun and smiles. “I would say it’s been fun and that I’m going to miss you, but I’d be lying through my teeth.”
He turns to leave.
“Where are you going?” Cathy cries.
“This way,” Rage says, then points in the opposite direction. “If you follow me, I’ll kill you, so I’d suggest you go that way.”
“What about Danny?” Mark asks. “We haven’t rescued him yet.”
“Screw him,” Rage says.
“You can’t go off by yourself,” Gokhan protests. “It’s dangerous here, innit? We should stick together.”
“Stick with you bunch of losers?” Rage laughs. “No way. So long, suckers!”
Then he flips us the finger and is gone.
NINETEEN
We hang around like a bunch of muppets, jaws open, senses reeling, until Tiberius finally stirs. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
“What about Danny?” Mark asks.
“Do you have any idea where his cell is?” Tiberius replies.
“No.”
“Then forget about him.”
“Wait a moment.” I can’t believe what I’m thinking as I stare at the remains of Dr. Cerveris.
“You want to tuck into his brain?” Cathy sneers. “Good luck—I doubt Rage left much.”
“It’s not that—although now that you mention it…”
Scraps of brain dot the interior of the dead doctor’s head. Ignoring my feelings of disgust, I run my fingers around it, then suck them, drawing a small burst of strength from the meager blobs. When the rest of the zom heads see that, they push in and copy me. They all come away with flecks of brain on their fingers, though I got the lion’s share of what was left.
When we’ve scraped Dr. Cerveris’s skull completely clean, I return to it, stick a hand into the hole in the doctor’s head, then feel around until I find the back of the eye that Rage didn’t puncture. I push softly while cutting around the flesh at the front of the socket with my other hand.
“What’s she doing?” Cathy squeals. “Has she gone mad?”
“I don’t think so,” Tiberius mutters. “The sensors… If we want to get out of here, we’ll have to get through doors that require fingerprints and a retinal scan.”
Dr. Cerveris’s eye oozes from its socket. I wipe the goo away, cup it gently in my palm and step back. “I did the eye. Who’s gonna cut off one of his hands?”
There’s a pause. Then Gokhan bends and starts slicing.
“This is so gross,” Cathy moans, but her lips are twitching and I can tell she’s trying hard not to smile. I feel like chuckling too. It shouldn’t be funny, but it is. I’m sure I’ll feel awful later when I look back on this, but right now I’m on an unnatural high.
“Nice of him to lend us a hand,” Tiberius deadpans, and I almost explode with laughter. I’m not the only one.
“Come on,” Mark snaps. He doesn’t find this in any way entertaining. “If we’re to escape, we’ll need to be quick, before they find us.”
“Who are they, Worm?” Peder snorts.
“The soldiers or the people who attacked.” Mark shrugs. “One’s as bad as the other, right?”
“What if they’re here to free us?” Cathy says. “Maybe it’s an army of zom heads come to break us out.”
I remember Mr. Dowling and the spiders. “No,” I sigh. “I don’t know who or what they are, but they haven’t come to help us. Mark’s right. We need to split ASAP, before we end up like Dr. Cerveris.”
I start off in the direction that Rage sent us, not wanting to risk a run-in with him, and after a moment of hesitation the rest of them fall in behind me.
I think about the butchered Dr. Cerveris as we progress, worrying about what happened. It wasn’t the fact that Rage killed him that bugs me. It’s how I reacted. I was on the verge of losing control. The sight of the brain triggered something inside me, and I almost switched off and went into full-on zombie mode.
I would have eaten anybody’s brain right then. If I hadn’t recovered my wits by chance, I’d have gone after Reilly. If I’d killed him and feasted, that would have been the end of me. I know that fresh brains are essential for revitalizeds, that I need to eat to hold on to my senses. But if I’d given in to my baser instincts and fed in such a grisly, inhuman fashion, I think I would have regressed anyway, and gladly, all too happy to leave my conscious self behind.
I’m clinging onto my semi-humanity, but only just. It won’t be long now. Soon I’ll hit a critical point and then it’s bye-bye, Becky Smith, hellooooo, zom-B!
TWENTY
We flee without any real plan in mind. I ask the others, as we run, if they have an idea of the layout of the complex, if they’ve seen more of it than I have. They all reply negatively. Mark has been to a lab that the rest of us haven’t visited, but it wasn’t far from zom HQ.
“I’ve always assumed we were underground,” Tiberius says, “because of the lack of daylight. But that’s not necessarily the case. We might simply be in the middle of a huge building.”
“No,” Peder says. “I once heard a soldier grumbling about being stuck down here. Reilly told him to shut up–I don’t think they were supposed to mention anything about where we are–but it was too late.”
“Then I guess we need to head for the top,” I grunt. “Let’s look for stairs.”
We push open every door that we pass and peer through every window. In the dark glass of one pane I catch sight of my reflection and pause. There’s a small red z on my right cheek. I frown, wondering how it got there. Then I recall the clown stroking my face. Shivering, I wipe the mark from my flesh and hurry on.
“Here!” Cathy shouts. She’s looking through a round panel of glass in a door. I press up beside her and spot a flight of stairs. I shake the door but it’s locked. There’s a control panel beside it.
“Time to test our toys,” I grin tightly. “Gokhan, you first. They usually press their fingers to the sensor before scanning their eye.”
Gokhan holds Dr. Cerveris’s fingers up to the panel. There’s a small beeping noise. I open my hand and reveal the eye. I roll it in my palm until it’s pointing the right way, then rest it in front of the re
tinal scanner. I have no confidence that it will work now that it’s been ripped from its socket, but to my delight there’s a second beep and the door slides open.
“Eye, eye!” Tiberius snickers, slipping past me and jogging up the stairs.
It’s only a single flight of steps. Seconds later we’re on a higher floor, identical to the one below, so we go looking for an exit or the next set of stairs. There are zombies loose on this level too, but they don’t interfere with us. They shoot us dark looks and sniff the air hungrily when they catch our scent, but when they realize we’re not walking snack boxes, they leave us be.
We find another set of stairs and climb, this time up three levels. Once again we search for a way out. But after a couple of minutes Mark looks through an open door and does a double take. “What the hell…?” he mutters.
“Worm!” Cathy barks. “This is no time for–”
“Shh!” he snaps, and the look on his face tells us this is serious.
Curious, we crowd around Mark and gape, slack jawed, at the hellish drama unfurling within.
It’s a massive room, the largest I’ve seen in the complex. Judging by the TV sets hanging from the walls, I’m guessing it’s a relaxation area, a much grander version of zom HQ.
Quite a lot of the staff are here, shoved up against one of the walls. They’re surrounded by snapping, howling zombies. But the living dead are only occasionally attacking. They’re being held in check by a team of people in hoodies. The zombie masters have wrinkled flesh, an ugly mass of purple patches and pustulant, peeling skin. They have pale yellow eyes, and if their hoodies slipped I know we’d see crops of unhealthy gray hair. I also know that they have no fingernails and their tongues are scabby and shriveled.
They’re the mutants I saw in my school, and before that on a visit to the Imperial War Museum. They were controlling zombies the last time I saw them, and they’re in command now too, directing the reviveds with blasts of the whistles that hang on strings from the neck of each mutant.
In the middle of the mutants and zombies is the clown, Mr. Dowling. He towers above the rest of them, which is strange, as I didn’t think he was unusually tall when I saw him in my cell. Glancing down, I see that he’s on stilts, balanced elegantly.
Mr. Dowling is waving his hands above his head, swaying gently, beaming insanely.
“Come on,” one of the mutants croaks at the weeping, moaning humans huddled against the wall. “Sing or we’ll set the doggies on you again. Sing!”
The other mutants take up the refrain and start to bellow, “Sing! Sing! Sing!”
Mr. Dowling giggles shrilly and twirls his arms like an orchestra conductor. The soldiers, scientists and nurses begin to chant together, having obviously been told what to sing before we hit the scene. They’re out of tune, and not all in sync, but the song is unmistakable.
“Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way,
Oh what fun it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh.”
The mutants screech with delight and clap enthusiastically. Mr. Dowling sighs happily and cups his hands to his heart, then wipes a finger across his cheeks as if to remove tears of joy. A couple of zombies dart forward and drag humans from the crowd. They carve their skulls open and tuck in. The survivors sing another creepy chorus of “Jingle Bells” at the rough prompting of the mutants.
While the doomed humans are singing, Mr. Dowling points at a woman and beckons her forward. She shakes her head, terrified, tears coursing down her cheeks. The clown frowns, then draws a finger across his throat. One of the mutants blows his whistle and a zombie drags the woman out and tears into her.
Mr. Dowling smiles and points to another woman. This one hurries forward, not even waiting for him to beckon. When she’s in front of him, his smile widens and he bends over and opens his lips. I expect a stream of spiders to come spilling out, but this time he reaches into his mouth and pulls out a scorpion. It’s alive and twisting wildly in his grip.
The clown puts a finger to the woman’s lips and taps them. With a gulp, she opens her mouth. He sticks his tongue out, then nods at her to do the same. With a delirious giggle, he lays the scorpion on her tongue, then nods for her to close her mouth. With fresh tears, she obeys his command, then falls away a moment later, coughing and choking.
The mutants cackle and kick the woman. The zombies hiss and a few more dart into the fray and emerge clutching struggling, screaming humans.
Then Mr. Dowling’s head turns and he trains his gaze on us. No… not on us… on me.
There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s looking at me specifically. His eyes burn into mine and his lips twitch as if he’s just spotted a dear friend. When the mutants see us, they squeal and dart towards us, dragging zombies with them.
Mr. Dowling makes a high whining noise and they stop instantly. As they retreat, he extends a hand towards me, turns it upside down, then slowly crooks his middle finger, beckoning me forward.
“Not even in your sodding dreams!” I scream, then whirl and race away, not caring if the others follow, not worrying about the direction I’m taking, knowing only that I have to get far away from the clown as quickly as possible, before he takes me into his embrace and turns me into something even worse than one of the walking, undead damned.
TWENTY-ONE
I find another set of stairs and surge to the top. The others aren’t far behind. We pause and listen closely. There are no footsteps. The mutants don’t seem to be chasing us.
I double over and make a sighing sound. I feel like I should be panting, but of course I can’t, since my lungs don’t work properly.
“Who the hell was that guy in the clown outfit?” Cathy moans.
“And those freaks in the hoodies,” Peder exclaims. “Were they zombies? Humans? What?”
“I don’t think they’re either,” I tell him. “They’re mutants. They were there when my school was invaded. It looks like they work for Mr. Dowling–the clown–but I’ve no idea what he is, or why they’re here, or why the zombies obey them, or…” I shake my head and scowl. “They don’t matter. We need to get out of here. We can wonder about it later.”
“But what if they come after us?” Cathy whimpers.
“All the more reason to get a move on,” Tiberius grunts, and off we set again.
Time seems to slow as we search for another set of stairs. We can’t find any, and the longer we go on, the more our spirits dip. We’re all in rough shape. The bits of brain we sucked from Dr. Cerveris’s head didn’t do much for us. The shooting pains are coming regularly now and I know the others are feeling them too by the way they wince and twitch every few minutes. My thoughts are starting to swim. It’s getting harder to focus.
“I think we’ve come the wrong way,” Gokhan mutters. “Just because we’re underground, it don’t mean the exit has to be at the top, eh? Maybe it’s at the bottom, a tunnel that leads to an elevator or something.”
Peder frowns. “But if we head down and don’t find it, what then?”
“We come back up,” Gokhan says.
“That means slipping past the clown and his mutants a couple of times,” Peder growls. “I don’t fancy that.”
“Maybe we don’t have to,” Cathy says. “There must be other flights of stairs. We’ve been taking the first set that we’ve found on every floor. Let’s go down a level and–”
“Wait,” Mark mutters, looking at the ceiling. “Did any of you have attic stairs at home, the sort that rest inside the attic when you’re not using them?”
“What sort of a question is that?” Cathy sneers.
“My parents put in a set a few years ago,” Mark says stiffly, ignoring her. “If you have steps like that, you use a thin pole to open the door, which is part of the stairs. In our home, the hole you stuck the tip of the pole into looked just like that one up there.”
I squint and spot the small opening that he’s talking about. “So there’s an attic. So what?”
>
“Why would they have an attic in an underground building?” Mark asks softly.
I stare harder at the hole. “You think it’s something else?”
“It has to be.” He shrugs. “I mean, it might just be a machine room or housing for an air-conditioning unit. But wouldn’t they have signs up if that was the case, like they have elsewhere?”
“I haven’t noticed any signs,” Peder grunts.
“Then you haven’t been paying as much attention as me,” Mark says smugly, then starts looking for a pole. We search too and a minute later we find one in a nearby room, tucked away in a corner.
I try to unlock the attic door but my hands are trembling and I can’t guide in the narrow tip. Peder and Tiberius try too, but both fail, their hands shaking as badly as mine.
“Give it to me,” Mark snaps, losing patience, and slots it in at the first attempt. His hands are remarkably steady. He doesn’t seem to be suffering like the rest of us. Maybe the doctors slipped him some nutrients on the sly when they were operating on him.
A set of steps drops smoothly as the door opens. I feel a stab of excitement. But before I can head up, Cathy pushes me aside and I stumble and fall over. “Ladies first,” she chuckles.
I scowl as she trots up, Peder, Gokhan and Tiberius just behind her. Mark helps me to my feet. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“Sure. But I’m gonna give her a thumping when this is–”
Two soldiers and a female scientist spill into the corridor. The scientist is babbling, “… right here. The pole’s in a room. Once we open the door, we can…” She spots Mark and me and curses.
One of the soldiers has a gun. He aims quickly and fires. A bullet rips by my head but misses.
“Up the steps!” I roar at Mark.
The soldier fires again, three times. One of the bullets strikes Mark’s left arm and blood sprays from it. He cries out and whirls away from the stairs. I duck as the soldier fires again, grab Mark and hurl him at the steps. He scrambles up them. I’m about to start after him, then pause, pick up the pole and throw it up into the space ahead of me.