by Cross, Amy
And now look at her.
Dead but still moving, she's trapped in the ropes. Her flesh is rotten in places and her clothes are ragged, and she looks – I shouldn't think this, but it's true – like some kind of monster. She barely even seems human, and I suppose in some ways she's not. She still just about has a human body, but I guess her brain has rotted so much that her mind is gone.
Suddenly hearing footsteps over my shoulder, I turn and see that Sarah Carter is coming this way across the dusty scrubland, with two assistants who are each carrying a large metal case. I instantly feel a shudder pass through my chest. Something about that woman just makes me feel really cautious.
“Stick around, boys,” Sarah says with a faint smile, as she stops and looks over at the zombie. “We're about to learn the truth about these disgusting things.”
10am
Elizabeth
“There are plenty of reasons why they might not have come back,” Dad is saying as Natalie and I enter the briefing room, which is buzzing with activity. “We can afford to give them more time before we start panicking.”
“All the patrols know that they have to stick to their schedule,” Diane says firmly. “Not sticking to the schedule is itself a sign that something's wrong. A five-man patrol could easily have sent somebody back to keep us informed if they needed more time. Kepler's a good commander. The fact that they're two hours late means that they've run into a problem.”
“What's going on?” Natalie whispers to me.
“It sounds like a patrol didn't come back,” I reply. “They take that sort of thing really seriously.”
“What are you doing here?” Dad yells, hurrying over to us. “You don't have permission to be in here!”
“I'm sorry,” I tell him, “but -”
“Not you.” He grabs Natalie by the arm and marches her back out into the corridor. “You're lucky I don't get you thrown into solitary confinement for entering this place without authorization.”
“She's with me!” I tell him.
“I'm with her!” Natalie snaps, pulling free from his grip.
“I'm sure you have a job to be doing,” Dad says, pushing her against the wall and then coming back into the briefing room. Turning, he makes a point of sliding the metal door shut, and I see Natalie's face curl into a scowl before she disappears from view. “I've told you before, Elizabeth,” Dad continues, “this room is off-limits to anyone who doesn't need to be here.”
“I guess I should leave, then,” I point out.
“Don't be fatuous.”
He steps past me and heads back over to the desk where the planning documents have been laid out. A dozen or so other officials, mostly members of the Council, are talking in hushed tones, and it's clear that there's a real sense of emergency.
I want to leave, to show Dad that I know I shouldn't be here, but curiosity gets the better of me and I start drifting toward the table, keen to find out exactly what's happening. To be honest, over the past month or so I still haven't quite figured out what's happening or who's on which side. None of the maps make much sense to me, and I feel as if everything beyond the limits of Boston must be complete chaos by now.
“The longer we sit around trying to figure this out,” Charles Bloom is saying, in that increasingly-adversarial tone that he's adopted lately, “the more we become targets. A missing patrol is a declaration of war. Let's not sit around and let our opponents dictate the pace. We need to strike hard and fast.”
“Charles raises a good point,” Dad says, turning to the others. “This is no accident. I think someone's testing us, to see how we respond. To see whether we're strong enough to defend ourselves.”
“Exactly!” Charles continues. “We're being prodded and poked by someone who wants to know our weaknesses. We have to strike back with maximum strength.”
“Are you okay?” a voice whispers next to me, and I turn to see that Diane Clark has come over.
“I'm fine,” I say tersely, turning back to watch as Charles and the others continue their debate.
Diane's the last person I want to see right now, after I interrupted her in my father's room during the night.
“I'd like to talk to you, Elizabeth,” she continues, keeping her voice low. “I'm not going to patronize you. I think you know what it's about.”
“I'll talk to my father, thank you.”
“Good luck,” she sighs. “I asked him to talk to you, but he said that there's nothing to talk about. I just want to make sure that there's nothing bubbling away beneath the surface. I'm a firm believer in getting things out into the open at the earliest possible point.”
“Good for you,” I reply, forcing myself to keep from looking at her. “I'm sure that approach works just fine.”
“Elizabeth, if -”
“And I'm sure they need you over there,” I add, finally turning to her again. “I'm not going to talk to you, Diane. Not about anything. What you and my father do is none of my business, so I'd appreciate it if you could keep me well out of the whole thing.”
She hesitates, as if she's about to reply, but then she nods as if she understands.
“You know where to find me if you change your mind,” she says. “My door's always open. I just hope that we can be civil, Elizabeth. Your father has always spoken very highly of you, even before all of this madness began.”
“Before it began?” I reply, struggling to work out exactly what she means. Staring at her, I feel a fresh, cold anger rising into my chest. “Did you know my father before it started? Have you known him for more than a hundred days?”
“Your father and I have been colleagues for years,” she replies. “Didn't he...”
Her voice trails off for a moment.
“Well,” she adds finally, forcing a smile, “there's no need to go into all of that right now, is there? As I said, you know where to find me, and I hope that one day soon we can have a proper talk. There are so few of us left in the world now, Elizabeth. We need to work together, as friends, rather than finding the things that divide us.”
With that she turns and walks away, leaving me standing alone and shocked. Spotting my father over at the desk, still talking to Charles, I can't shake the feeling that Dad has been lying to me. He could have mentioned that he and Diane go back a long way, and it seems suspicious that they've suddenly fallen into bed together. I really don't want to think the worst, but now I'm remembering all those times when Mom would look after us while Dad worked late. Is it possible that Dad's relationship with Diane was actually going on before all of this started?
Filled with simmering anger, I start making my way over to ask Dad.
And then I freeze, as I see a familiar face at the table. I blink several times, convinced that this has to be a hallucination, but his face remains and I watch as he talks to some of the others.
It's Bob.
He's not looking at me. He's chatting away to Diane and Charles, as if he fits right in here with them.
When I thought I saw Bob earlier, I was able to tell myself that the whole thing was an illusion. After all, I remember shooting Bob on the seventh or eighth day of this madness, and I don't think there can be much doubt that the man is long dead. If that's the case, though, how can he be here and how can he be talking to people?
I head over to take a better look. The fake Bob hasn't spotted me yet, which I guess is a good thing, and it's clear that he's busy talking to a couple of Dad's colleagues. They're locked in an animated conversation which seems separate from what Dad and Charles are talking about, and finally I come up behind Bob – or whoever he is – and stop to listen.
“We need a system of screening people,” one of the men is saying. “We can't afford to keep turning people away. We need more able-bodied people in this city, and -”
Before he can finish, he glances straight at me.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I open my mouth to reply, but suddenly the fake Bob turns and looks at me, and I feel an in
stant rush of relief as I see that it's not Bob at all. He looks a little like him, sure, but the similarity is pretty superficial and I guess my subconscious mind must have made the difference.
“Do you want something?” the Bob look-alike asks. “We're kind of in the middle of something here.”
“No, it's fine,” I say as I back away from him. “Please, carry on. Ignore me.”
I continue backing away, until I bump into somebody else. Then, suddenly feeling as if I'm in danger of drawing attention to myself, I hurry out of the room. Once I reach the corridor I stop and try to get my head together, but deep down I know that's something's wrong. That's twice today that I've hallucinated Bob, and this condition seems to have come out of nowhere.
I need to get my head straight, and fast.
11am
Thomas
“Try again,” Carter says, as she watches one of her associates pick up another rock. “That last one was inconclusive. I want to know whether she's able to identify the threat, or whether it's simply a response to pain.”
The man steps around behind the zombie and hesitates for a moment, before throwing a rock. His last throw merely hit the zombie's arm, but this time the rock thuds against the side of her head.
She snarls and turns partway toward him, and for a few seconds she pulls again on the ropes.
“It's not clear enough,” Carter continues, evidently unhappy with how her tests are going. “I need to know whether the creature is responding to specific inputs. Let's try this again. And please, can we stick to the rules for once? We're not out here tossing rocks at random, like apes. We're here to conduct a serious scientific study.”
“Do we have to watch this?” I mutter, as Carter makes some more notes. “They're torturing the damn thing.”
“It's a zombie,” Toad replies. “I'm pretty sure a little light torture is acceptable.”
“It still doesn't feel right.”
“Come on, Thomas,” he says with a sigh, “don't start feeling sorry for the thing.”
“I don't feel sorry for the zombie,” I tell him. “It's the person it used to be, that's all. I feel sorry for her.”
“I'm pretty sure that the offer for us to stay was, in fact, an order,” Toad replies. “She needs a couple of guards to stick around, just in case anything goes wrong. She's not an idiot, she knows these creatures are dangerous and unpredictable.”
At that moment, as if to prove Toad's point, Jane lashes out again, snarling at Carter and pulling on the ropes in a desperate attempt to attack. The stakes are still firmly embedded in the ground, and as Jane struggles I can't help wondering whether she's going to accidentally dig the ropes straight through her own neck and decapitate herself. Then again, at least that would mean this whole business would be over, and right now I can't help thinking that Jane's being needlessly tormented.
Is Sarah Carter really learning anything from what she's doing?
I watch as another rock hits Jane, this time hitting her in the mouth and knocking out several teeth. Pulling back slightly, Jane tries to turn away, only for the ropes to once again hold her in place. She still seems not to understand about the ropes at all, which I guess proves that there's not much brain activity going on in there.
“Is she in pain?” I ask.
“They don't feel pain,” Toad points out.
“But she looked like -”
“Don't.”
I turn to him. “Don't what?”
“Don't start feeling sorry for a goddamn zombie, Thomas. Whatever that Jane girl was once, now she's a monster. There's nothing left of her real mind.”
“What if there is?” I ask, turning to look again at Jane as she pulls on the ropes. “What if even a tiny part of her has survived in there? We don't know how it works, not for certain. If only certain parts of her brain have rotted, what's left might somehow be aware.”
“That doesn't even make sense,” Toad replies.
“What if she -”
Before I can finish, Jane lets out another scream, this one more anguished than before. Turning to look over at her, I see that Carter is using some kind of long, modified leaf-picker to gouge away a chunk of skin and flesh from the side of Jane's neck. She's working quickly, and mumbling to herself, and after a moment she pulls off a significant chunk, which she then deposits in a plastic box that one of her assistants quickly seals.
“What did she do that for?” I ask.
“I need a live sample to study,” Carter says, turning to me with an arched eyebrow. “Don't think I couldn't hear you two nattering away over there. Your compassion for this poor creature is commendable, Thomas, though perhaps a little misplaced.” She takes the plastic box from her assistant and wanders over to join us. “Even with the minimal equipment that I've managed to scrape together, this sample will undoubtedly reveal a great deal about how these creatures work. We can't use them if we don't understand them, can we?”
“Use them?” I reply. “How?”
“Humanity is going to recover,” she continues. “Things looked shaky for a while, but we're finding our feet again and if anything this culling of the herd might prove to be a blessing in disguise. There'll be no more worries about over-population for a while, will there?” She smiles. “Before this disaster, the world was making great strides in technology, but we were being held back by the sheer number of useless people. There were more than seven billion people on the planet. I don't know how many there are now, but I imagine it could be well under one billion. This is a chance for our species to start over.”
“I'm not sure it's going to be quite that easy,” Toad suggests.
“The world was going to hell,” she says firmly. “This zombie outbreak is our reprieve. And I've always been a firm believer in the idea that when you encounter a negative, you have to turn it into a positive.”
With that, she slowly holds the box out and removes the lid.
I flinch and pull back as I see the patch of rotten meat.
“Don't be afraid,” Carter continues, “it won't hurt you. It might, however, be a kind of Rosetta Stone of the human body, allowing us to see how it functions under different stresses. There's no way the human body should have been able to survive in this zombie form, so obviously there are some major aspects that we've failed to take into account. Maybe the zombie can become a force for good.”
“How?” I ask.
“That's what I need to find out,” she says, before closing the box and making sure that the lid is securely in place. “I don't know what I'm going to discover, Thomas. I just know that it's going to be something very new.”
Feeling something crawling on my hand, I look down and quickly swat away another ant.
“So far,” Carter continues, looking back down at the piece of meat, “I can tell you that the sample is very dry. That's not exactly a surprise, but I'm curious as to how these creatures are able to move when they're so desperately dehydrated.”
“Wouldn't they start falling apart?” I ask.
“They certainly should.”
“So they can't be that dry,” I continue. “Something must be keeping them mobile.”
“You have a good analytical mind,” she replies. “I like that. These zombies aren't magical creatures. There's science behind them.” She looks back down at the sample. “I can't wait to get this thing under a microscope.”
“And where are you gonna get one of those from?” Toad asks her.
“Oh, you'd be surprised what I've managed to pick up,” she says.
“You just happened to find a microscope in the dust somewhere?” he replies, sounding skeptical.
“Darling, I practically sleep with one in my hand at all times,” she says with a smile, before glancing at me again. “Everyone travels with their essentials in an emergency. For me, that meant putting some equipment into a backpack. The weight was unfortunate, but I managed to keep going.”
“So now you're going to cut her up like a lab rat?” I ask.
“I want the pair of you to continue guarding the creature,” Carter says, turning and starting to head back toward the town. “I might want to take some more samples later.”
“Jane,” I reply.
Stopping, she turns to me. She looks completely oblivious, as if she has no idea why I just said that word.
“Her name was Jane,” I continue. “Her purse fell out. I saw her name.”
“You didn't touch it, did you?”
I shake my head.
“Good,” she says after a moment. “Well, Jane is a very nice name. Perhaps one day Jane will be rather famous for the insight that her body will provide.”
With that, she turns and walks away.
“Well,” Toad mutters, “she certainly has opinions about a lot of things, doesn't she?”
“What if she's right?” I reply uncertainly.
“You can be right and still sound like an ass,” he points out.
“I don't want her to be right,” I tell him. “The world was okay before. Not perfect, but okay. There's always someone who's unhappy, I guess it was just her turn to be miserable for a while. But all of this isn't better than what we had before.”
“I can watch the creature,” Toad says after a moment. “I mean, Jane. I know you don't like seeing her.”
“It's not that,” I reply, turning to him, “it's just that she's alive. Or she was. She should be treated with some dignity. That's basically a corpse that they're messing with.”
“There's not much dignity in the world anymore,” Toad says with a sigh. “I guess dignity's one of the things that got lost when everything turned to crap.” He pauses. “It shouldn't be like that, thought,” he adds after a few seconds. “You're right, Thomas. When Carter and the others are finished with this Jane girl, we should make sure that she's treated properly.”
“Maybe we should do something now,” I suggest.
“Do you know why I hid myself away on my farm?” he asks. “I hated the state of the world, but I also knew there was nothing I could do to change it. I withdrew in disgust and waited for what I figured was the inevitable breakdown of society. And do you know what? I was pretty much right that something was gonna happen. The point is, assholes like Carter can't be stopped. Sure, you can stop the individual asshole, but there'll be plenty more to take that one's place. So don't fight. Just carve out a place for yourself.”
