There’s a pool table and a ping-pong table down at one end of the room. A bookshelf with a scattering of books, magazines and comics. A couple of TVs, one hooked up to a DVD player, the other to a video-game console. There’s a table close to that TV, loaded with games and a few iPods. A variety of couches and chairs are positioned around the place.
A couple of the zom heads are playing pool. Three are busy gaming. One–the girl called Cathy–is watching TV and filing down her teeth. And the final zom head is slumped on a chair near the bookshelf, flicking through a car magazine.
Seven in total. One more than I saw in the room all those weeks ago.
I hover by the door–Reilly didn’t say anything when he let me in–waiting for the others to notice me. Finally one of the guys playing pool looks up and shouts, “Hey! It’s the girl who kicked Rage’s arse!”
Everything comes to a stop and those who were sitting stand up to ogle me, all except the one in the chair with the magazine. He just glances at me, yawns, then returns to his mag.
I push forward, smiling awkwardly. “Hi. I’m Becky Smith, but everyone calls me B.”
“Becky it is,” one of the boys laughs, and jogs across. He sticks out a hand—it’s covered by a glove and bandages. “I’m Mark,” he says as we shake hands. “I wasn’t there when you revitalized. They keep me out of stuff like that. Afraid I’ll react badly to the flames.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
The boy gestures at himself. He’s covered completely from neck to toe, heavy clothes, some sort of a padded vest, more bandages, heavy-duty boots. “I got burned to the bone while I was a revived. They don’t know how. My face is okay but I’m like a skeleton under all these layers. I have to stay wrapped up. They’re worried that if I lose any more internal–”
“Can it, Worm,” one of the other boys says. “You’d bore her to death if she wasn’t already dead.” He nods at me but doesn’t smile. He’s dark-skinned, with short curly hair. I would have shot him the finger six months ago in response to his nod. But since I’m trying to change and accept everyone as an equal, no matter what color they are, I nod back at him instead.
“B,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says drily. “I’m not deaf. I’m Peder.”
“Danny,” the boy beside him says. Danny’s tall and bony. Greasy blond hair and bad acne. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt like mine. As I look around, I see that all of the others are similarly dressed, except for the guy in the chair. He’s in the leathers he was wearing when I first saw him.
“Cathy Kelly,” the girl introduces herself coldly. She sits and focuses on the video game. She has long, dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Pretty, but not in a soft way.
One of the other boys comes over and shakes my hand. “Gokhan.”
“Gherkin?” I frown.
“Gokhan.” He spells it out. “Turkish, innit?”
He’s plump and relaxed-looking. Olive skin. Large, pudgy fingers. He’s filed down the bones sticking out of the tips and painted them with swirling, colorful designs.
“And I’m Tiberius,” the other guy who was playing pool says. He’s the one who first spotted me. He’s short, with ginger hair and loads of freckles.
“Tiberius?” I laugh automatically. “What sort of a dumb name is that?”
“I was named after the river Tiber in Rome,” he says stiffly. Then he turns his back on me, offended, and snaps at Mark, “Are you playing or what, Worm?”
“In a minute,” Mark says. “I want to show B round first. Don’t you want to get to know her? She’s one of us now.”
“Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t,” the boy in the chair says. He finally stands, cracks his knuckles over his head and makes a yawning motion. I know from practicing in my cell that we can mimic the habits of the past, when we had a set of fully functioning lungs. I even find myself yawning or sneezing by accident sometimes, my body remembering happier, simpler days.
The yawning knuckle cracker is the tall guy with the big head and small ears, the chubby, rosy cheeks, a chunk bitten out of the left one. The guy I clobbered over the head when I first recovered. Rage.
“Of course she’s one of us,” Mark says. “She can talk, can’t she?”
“Oh, she’s a revitalized,” Rage says, eyeing me beadily. “Doesn’t mean she’s a zom head though. You’ve gotta earn that right. Which you haven’t yet, Worm, in case you’d forgotten.”
Mark scowls and stares at his feet. “It’s not my fault they don’t let me join in with the rest of you. I would if I could. You know that.”
“You say that you would,” Rage sneers. “But there’s saying and there’s doing, and so far you’ve done zip. For all we know, you’ve cried off and asked to be excused regular duties. Maybe the burns are a sham. Maybe they’re just saying that because you asked them to cover up for the fact that you’re a coward.”
Mark stiffens, then squares himself and raises his fists. His hands are shaking, more with fear, I think, than indignation. “Say that again and I’ll thump you,” he squeaks. “I don’t care how big you are.”
Rage laughs. “Back down, Worm. I’m only messing with you.”
He comes closer and circles me slowly. I say nothing while I’m being examined. When he’s finished, I stare at him calmly. “Like what you see?”
“Not a lot,” he sniffs. “I don’t think Cathy has much to worry about.”
“Why should I be worried?” the girl barks, looking up from her game.
“You’ve been queen bee round these parts,” Rage says. “You know that all the boys fancy you, since they’ve no one else to lust after. Nobody would want to lose that sort of a following. And I don’t think you will. No offense, Becky.”
“Get stuffed,” I snarl.
Rage cocks his head. “Are you a tough girl?” he whispers. “You are, aren’t you? A fighter, yeah?”
“Wind me up and find out,” I challenge him, fingers curling by my sides.
Rage glances at my fingers, then studies my eyes. “Looks like I was wrong. You are one of us.”
“We accept you, gooble gobble,” Tiberius chuckles from beside the pool table.
“What the hell does that mean?” I growl.
“Pay no attention to him,” Gokhan laughs. “He’s always coming out with weird crap like that.”
“It’s from Freaks,” Tiberius says. “That old movie about circus freaks.” He looks around for support. “Some of you must have seen it.”
“Was it black-and-white?” Cathy asks.
“Yeah. It was made in the 1930s.”
“Then of course we haven’t seen it,” she snorts. “We don’t all waste our time on boring old movies.”
“Freaks, boring?” Tiberius roars. “It’s an amazing film. They used real-life freaks. It gave me nightmares the first time my dad showed it to me.”
“They’d probably have found a role for you in it if you’d been alive back then,” Cathy says frostily.
Tiberius glares at her, then turns to me. “Anyway, at one point a normal woman marries one of the freaks and they have a big party to welcome her into the family. They all start chanting, We accept you, gooble-gobble. They mean it nicely, but what they’re really saying is that she’s one of them now, a freak, an outcast, a child of the damned.”
Tiberius bends over the pool table to take a shot, then says again, but glumly this time, as if he feels sorry for me, “We accept you, gooble-gobble.”
EIGHT
I spend the rest of the day with the zom heads, getting to know them. It’s awkward. None of us wants to be here. We haven’t chosen each other for company. We come from different parts of London, Danny from as far out as Bromley. We don’t have much in common, except for the fact that we were all killed when the zombies attacked.
“Do you remember much about that day?” I ask Mark. I’m with him, Gokhan and Tiberius on one of the couches close to the mirror.
“No,” he says. “I was at school. Things we
nt mad. I was running. I didn’t even know why. I was part of a pack, doing what everybody else was. I thought someone had a gun and was shooting people, like they do in America. Then something struck the side of my head and I blacked out. Next thing I knew, I was waking up here, wrapped up tighter than a bloody Mummy.”
“What about you?” I ask the others.
They shake their heads.
“We’ve gone over this dozens of times,” Tiberius says. “It was pretty much all we talked about for the first few weeks. Everyone was at school, except Rage, who was in a shopping center with his girlfriend. Zombies attacked. We were bitten. We revitalized here.”
“Were you locked into your school?”
Tiberius frowns. “What?”
“The exits were blocked in mine. We couldn’t get out.”
“What, someone actually stopped you from escaping?” Mark gasps.
“Yeah. We tried two different doors and they were both jammed. What about the mutants?”
“Come again?” Tiberius asks.
“There were mutants at our school, coordinating the zombies, directing them.”
“Bull,” he snorts.
“No, I’d seen a couple of them before. Ugly mothers with gray hair and yellow eyes. They all wear hoodies.”
“You’re dreaming,” Tiberius insists.
“I’m dead,” I snap. “We don’t dream.”
Tiberius clicks his tongue against his teeth. “So, what, you’re saying the attacks were deliberate? That we were targeted?”
“I dunno,” I shrug. “I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“Hey, Rage, have you heard about this?” Tiberius yells and makes me repeat my story.
“Anybody else see hooded mutants?” Rage asks the rest of the zom heads once I’m done. Everyone’s staring at me, having stopped whatever they were doing to listen.
“I didn’t see any mutants,” Peder says, “but one of the exit doors at my school was locked. I was furious. I’d gone through hell to make it that far. I kept kicking and punching it until the zombies swarmed me.” He rubs his upper right arm, where a deep cut runs from the shoulder down to his elbow.
“It’s something we wondered about before,” Danny says. “How did the zombies get inside the buildings in the first place? Why were there so many of them? Where did they come from? Some of us think we might have been victims of a conspiracy.”
“Terrorists,” Cathy whispers.
“Get real,” I laugh. “You can’t think this was a terrorist attack. What, they got sick of bombs and guns, decided to use zombies instead?”
“Chemical warfare,” Cathy says seriously. “It’s something that terrorists have been exploring for years. Maybe they found a way to reanimate the dead. I mean, unless it’s some sort of freak disease, somebody must have set those undead bastards loose on us.”
“It could have been aliens,” Mark suggests.
Tiberius nods enthusiastically. “That’s my vote.”
“That’s why you’re a pair of airheads,” Rage jeers. “Aliens! Cathy’s right. It was probably cooked up by mad scientists. Whether they were working for foreign powers or not, I don’t know. I think it might have been our own guys, that it got leaked accidentally.”
“If that was the case, they wouldn’t have just struck at the schools,” Cathy argues.
“They didn’t,” Rage responds. “I was in a shopping mall. I heard that there had been attacks at hospitals, airports, all sorts of places.”
“Yeah, attacks,” Cathy presses. “If it was an accidental breakout, it would have spread from one spot and rippled outwards. But they struck all over London at the same time. Explain that, if it wasn’t planned.”
There’s a troubled silence. I’m disappointed that nobody seems to know any more than I do. I was hoping to find answers, but the zom heads are victims like me, ignorant of what really happened.
“Anybody know if the zombies are still running wild out there?” I ask.
“They don’t tell us stuff like that,” Peder says. “They don’t even tell the teacher’s pet what’s going on outside, do they, Rage?”
“Bite me,” Rage barks, and the others laugh.
“Why’s he their pet?” I ask.
“He sucks up to them,” Tiberius smirks.
“It’s all, Yes, Mr. Reilly, sir! and, No, Mr. Reilly, sir!” Danny jeers.
“Can I help you with anything, Dr. Cerveris?” Gokhan adds. “Do you want me to bend over, so you can stick your needle up my–”
“One more word, eunuch boy, and it’ll be your last for a while,” Rage says softly, and the teasing stops instantly. He glares around and everyone drops their gaze. Except me.
“Something you want to say?” he growls.
“Yeah,” I answer calmly. “Why’d you call him eunuch boy?”
Rage relaxes. “He’s Turkish. Half of that lot are eunuchs.”
“Hey!” Gokhan objects. “That’s racist, innit?”
“Not if it’s true,” I smirk, and the others laugh. I grin for a moment. Then I recall Tyler and my vow to put my crude ways behind me, and my face drops. Looks like I’ll have to try harder in the future. Old habits die hard.
“So nobody knows anything,” I mutter. “We don’t know how zombies came to be, why they attacked when they did, how they struck in so many different places at once, or what the upshot of it was. The undead might have all been killed or captured, or maybe they’re still on the loose and this is the last place on earth where the living can walk around safely.”
“It’s not,” Danny says confidently. “I overheard Reilly talking with one of the other soldiers. He was telling him to shape up or they’d ship him out to a different unit, one that wasn’t as tightly secured as this place.”
“Well done,” Cathy says scathingly.
“What?” Danny whines.
She nods at the mirror. “You know that they’re listening. You’ve just gone and dropped Reilly in it.”
“Well, he’s one of them,” Danny sniffs. “I don’t care what happens to him, just like he doesn’t really care about any of us.”
“Reilly’s all right,” Peder says.
“Yeah,” Danny agrees, “but at the end of the day he’s just doing his job. He treats us decently because he’s told to. If they told him to put us down, you think he wouldn’t?”
There’s another long, uneasy silence.
“I thought you guys were better off than me,” I say softly. “But you’re not, are you? You’re prisoners, just like I am.”
“Yeah,” Mark says when nobody else replies. “But it’s not all bad. We could be reviveds. They keep them in huge holding cells, packed in tight together, none of the comforts that they treat us to. And they experiment on them. We don’t have to deal with any of that.”
“No?” Cathy laughs cruelly. “You’re even dumber than I thought, Worm.” She points at the mirror again. “What do you think all this is? We’re guinea pigs, just like the reviveds. And when Dr. Cerveris and his crew have learned all that they can, we’ll be discarded as casually as the others are.”
We all stare at the mirror and wonder who’s on the other side and what they might be thinking. Then we drift apart and everyone goes to their own part of the room to brood. Some of them shoot me dirty looks every so often, blaming me for reminding them that at the end of the day we’re just fancily treated prisoners, at the mercy of those who have absolutely no human reason to show us any.
NINE
Reilly takes us back to our cells one at a time and leaves us there for what must be night. That develops into a routine. He escorts us to zom HQ (as we call it) every day, lets us mix for several hours, then returns us to our cells. We always go with him individually. Nobody ever gets to see where the other zom heads are housed. We could all be quartered in the same corridor, or in completely different parts of the complex—we’ve no idea.
They could leave us with each other the whole time–like me, the others don’t need to s
leep–but Tiberius thinks they’re trying to institutionalize us, to make us easier to control.
I try to discuss the attacks and the outside situation again, but nobody wants to talk about that. They’ve been through it all before and are reluctant to rehash old arguments. It doesn’t matter that all of the theories are fresh to me. They’ve been together for months now, and even though they’re not tight like real friends, they share a bond that I’m not yet a true part of. They’re not going to break their rules just to please the new zom head on the block.
Even Mark, the friendliest of the lot, gets prickly when I push him.
“Just leave it, B,” he mutters. “What’s the point? We can’t do anything about it. If they want to tell us, they will. If they don’t, they won’t, and all the guessing in the world won’t get us any closer to the truth.”
Mark’s the runt of the litter. The others tease him and pick on him, even Cathy. They call him Worm and mock him for not being allowed to join the zom heads when they experiment on reviveds. Mark takes it as best he can, laughs along with them, only occasionally grimaces when they go too far.
Danny tested me on my second day in zom HQ. Tossed a casual insult my way to see how I’d react.
“Say that again and you’ll be picking the remains of your teeth out of your mouth,” I told him, ready to back up the words with action if pushed. But Danny’s no fool. He saw that I was serious and judged me a genuine threat, even though I’m a girl and he’s bigger than me. Nobody’s given me grief since then.
Rage is the undisputed leader of the pack. He’s a big old bruiser–easy to see how he got his nickname–but clever too, reads a lot, excels at the more difficult video games, knows about all sorts of things. Reminds me a bit of my dad, a bully but sharp. It’s hard to get the better of people like that. You can’t beat them up and you can’t outsmart them. Rage doesn’t seem to be as violent as my dad, but he’s not somebody you provoke lightly because there’s always the chance that he’ll snap and smash you up.