Dead End Job (Book One of the 'Zombino' series)

  *Clunk*

  He pulled on a piece of string dangling from above and sound reverberated like a gong inside the hollow, thin shell.

  "Oh, dear," he said, quickly stepping out.

  "Zombie?"

  "Yes. Well, there's someone on the floor."

  "What are they doing?"

  "They're surrounded by potato chips. Beef ones. All over the floor. They're moving a bit. The zombie, I mean. Not the crisps."

  Right. 'Something something, Beef Crisps'. They're the words he said. I reached the door in half a heartbeat and pushed my head firmly inside. The doorway didn't have quite enough space for both myself and Stuart but we made it work. He relinquished his share and allowed me to power through.

  It was a store room of sorts, where supplies of coffee and snacks were all neatly placed on shelves and in stacked-up boxes. It was just long enough for a human person, dead or alive, to lie in.

  The zombie, as Stuart correctly figured it, sprawled out on its face, apparently oblivious to our presence. Its arms shuffled as if trying to crawl through some cramped, imaginary tunnel. A minefield of broken crisps and torn up packets littered the floor. It wore the standard coffee shop uniform of black shirt and pants that went down to mid-calf, a pair of loose sandals and a purple coloured apron.

  A box sat on the floor next to it, torn open and empty. The only box of non-Prawn Cocktail potato chips in the entire room.

  "Motherfucker ate all the good crisps," I whined, hoping for consolation from my companions.

  "Beef flavour. Like it craved meat, but got confused," Stuart said. He moved to stamp on it but I held him back, feeling a touch sorry for the poor ex-girl, slithering around in crushed crisps. All it had wanted was something with a bit of meat to it, just like me. The look on her face wasn't violent or angry; it was mixed up, tired and desolate. Helpless and frightened, like a new born pony finding its feet. Her eyes were a dash more focussed than the others, imbued with a sliver of sad humanity. She either lacked the energy or will to get up, or to shovel any of the strewn snacks into her dry, peeled lips.

  I covered her head with a spare apron, feeling like I'd zipped up a body-bag, and ignored the instruction to 'Have a great day!' printed in stark yellow letters on the garment.

  Other than the zombie and the scattered chips (which I dared not eat) the storeroom was a bust. A box on a shelf labelled 'Sweets' sat empty except for inedible crumbs and a sense of disappointment. Most other boxes were full of Prawn fucking Cocktail crisps. The wagon was packed tight with the bastards. So many that it unsettled me, like this is where the world's entire supply of terrible, terrible crisps were stored for some evil, sinister reason.

  Thoughts of a complex ruse by pro-Prawn marketeers entered my brain. After the zombie outbreak quietened down, the survivors in the office would be left with nothing to eat but packets of these vile potato chips. We would eat so many that we eventually came to love them in a warped, food-based case of Stockholm Syndrome. I wondered why any snack manufacturer would do such a thing to me and I welled up a little, until Susan appeared and dangled a packet of BBQ Steak from her fingers.

  I stepped back over the grumpy, moaning zombie under the apron ("Hey, wise-guys, who turned out the lights?" it would say, if it was a sideline character in a terrible comedy) and snatched them from her.

  "Thought that would cheer you up," she said, moving away from the door to allow my eyes to land on a veritable treasure trove of goodness stacked on the counter. Next to Stuart's woeful bounty she had placed a pile of fizzy-pop cans, a few bags of not-shit potato chips and an entire wholesale-sized box of chocolate bars. They were some sort of fair trade, ethical chocolate that cost an hour's wage per bar but they were still, by far, the best thing I'd seen that day. I ate three whilst my companions fought with the coffee machine, then I made a start on the crisps, relishing the artificial taste of meaty goodness.

  I was three handfuls into my second bag when a cup of light brown liquid splashed down in front of me, swishing from side to side with a thin wooden stick in it.

  "What's this?" I asked, tearing away the packaging from the cans and cracking one open, one-handed, because that looks cool.

  "It's a coffee," Stuart said.

  "It doesn't look much like coffee."

  "What does it look like then?"

  I thought for a moment.

  "Cat diarrhoea."

  "Oh, that's pleasant..." Susan said, lowering her cup from her lips without having taken a sip.

  I chugged an entire can down before yanking out a second. "I don't do coffee. Coffee is a devil drink which tastes like unhappy soot. I want no part of it."

  Stuart showed mild hurt and took it away from me.

  "I could do you a soup, if you like. There's an option for that on the machine."

  My hand slowly raised up, rocking side to side and clasping two fresh chocolate bars. I intended to make eye-contact too, but it was difficult with my head tilted to allow optimum soda quantities to flush down my gullet. He turned back to the machine and fiddled with the settings until an ugly pea-coloured gunk slopped into a cup from a metal pipe. He sniffed it once and recoiled, then dropped it through a hole marked 'TRASH'.

  I wanted to stand right there, munching endless chocolate bars and drinking cans of fancy-brand cola until the rescue arrived or diabetes took me.