should decide what to . . .”
Spangles of light erupt in the corners of my vision, then Black punches
me in the face, and I fade . . .
1 1
Something is fluttering around my face. My eyes open, just a squint. It’s
a dove, a white dove, beating its beautiful wings and fanning my face
with air. I shut my eyes again. Lovely.
Right up to the point where the world rushes in and I remember
where the hell I am and what I’m doing here. My eyes snap open.
It’s not a dove. It’s Smitty, wafting some paper napkins in my face. I’m
lying on the grubby couch and he’s kneeling above me, grinning, like he’s
trying to annoy me, not revive me. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to
nurse someone sarcastically, but Smitty pulls it off.
“Better?” he asks, clearly peeved that I’m not reacting to his fan action.
“I’m fine.” My voice sounds wobbly even to me. I shift my head.
Alice is sitting on the desk, chewing her cud, and looking me over with
a malevolent eye. Pete is fiddling with the lock on the filing cabinet,
but casting me weird glances. What’s with them? I shift my weight and
sit up. It’s a little quick; black shadows close in from the corners of my vision and threaten to make me pass out again. No, I tell the shadows. To faint once is embarrassing; to do it twice would be beyond mortifying.
“Are you sure you’re fine?” Alice asks.
“You look really pale,” adds Pete. Yeah. Pot, kettle, white, Pete.
“Totally fine,” I repeat, swinging my legs around onto the floor.
My embarrassment is undiminished, but I’m touched that they care.
Who knew?
“So you don’t feel like you’re going to die and then come back to life
again?” Alice cuts to the chase.
Aha. So that’s where this is going.
I jump to my feet. “Of course not!” The room is undulating slightly, but
I choose to ignore it. “I just fainted because I’m hungry. It’s no biggie.”
“You sure that driver didn’t bite you when you were on the bus?” Alice
demands.
Holy crap. Her hand — tucked ever-so-casually behind her on the
desk — is holding a knife. A huge, gleaming carving knife, with a black
handle.
“Bite me? No, he didn’t bite me!” I shout at her. “What the hell are you
doing with that?” I point at the knife.
She brings it out in front of her.
“Son of a biscuit.” Smitty scrambles to his feet. “Malice has got a
blade.”
“So?” Alice says. “You said we should arm ourselves.”
“Not against each other!” I cry.
“Uh-oh,” Pete says helpfully from the corner.
“Put the knife down,” Smitty says.
“No!” Alice backs toward the chair. “I can do what I want.”
“Not if you’re going to slice and dice your friends, you can’t,”
Smitty says.
Alice tosses her head. “She’s no friend of mine. None of you are. What,
just because we’re flung together in this nightmare we’re suddenly supposed to be best buds? If so, then kill me now.”
“That can be arranged, trust me.” I take a step toward her. Smitty’s
by my side.
“Who has got the knife here, losers?” Alice jiggles it at us and climbs
onto the chair in the doorway.
This is ker-razy. I struggle out of my coat and throw off my fleece.
“Look at me!” I hold up my arms to her. “Check me out!” I pull up the
sleeves of my long T-shirt. “Where are the bite marks, Alice? Huh?”
I tug at my leggings on my good leg and show her my goose-bumped
calf. “See? I’m clean.”
Alice flinches. “You could have been bitten somewhere else.”
“Where?” I lift my shirt up to reveal my stomach, then my back. Pete
makes a kind of choking noise in the corner. “There,” I say, with the new—
found braveness of a flasher. “What else? What will make you happy?”
“Actually, you should take everything off, just to be sure,” Smitty says.
I reach as if to slap him, and he dodges out of the way, laughing.
“All right.” Alice comes down off her chair, knife still aloft. “But if you turn purple and start drooling” — she narrows her eyes and positively glowers — “I will finish you.” She jabs at me with the knife, which slips and catches her hand as she drops it. “Ow!”
This finishes Smitty sure enough. He’s rolling on the floor laughing
his ass off. I pick the knife up and slap it down on the desk.
“I am way too hungry to cope with all this drama,” I announce, and
climb over the chair out of the room and away from them all, so they
can’t see me shaking.
We sit in the café at one of the tables nearest to the office. That’s in
case we have to run back in there. It feels safe, or safe-ish, in the office: a smaller hole to scurry into. Smitty has moved the couch in front of the door to the outside, and out here he’s also managed to improvise a barricade for the main entrance. I take my hat off to him; it’s not easy when most of the furniture is fixed to the floor. The snow is doing some kind of crazy tornado thing outside the windows: It actually looks like the flakes are falling up. I don’t know if we’ll need the barricades; if it keeps up like this, the Cheery Chomper will be igloo-ized by nightfall. That’s not such an unattractive prospect. Can the undead die from frostbite?
I have wiped down a table with some disinfectant from the boxes in
the office, and appointed myself head waitress. Thanks to my efforts,
we are now sitting looking at a table full of pre-packaged sandwiches.
There is egg salad and celery, roast beef and onion, cheese and pickle,
and tuna and sweet corn. Why sandwich makers in this country are
quite so obsessed with two fillings — no more, no less — is beyond me,
but there you go. I play with the plastic edge of my saran-wrapped cheesy
delight.
Alice looks at me. “You first.” She may have lost the knife, but she
hasn’t lost the attitude.
“We should cook up some burgers, I’m telling you.” Smitty tosses his
sandwich packet down on the table.
It’s like Russian roulette between two slices of bread. Nobody wants
to eat. We’re starving — or, in Alice’s case, hyped up on chocolate that
she was pigging out on while we were busy doing all the hard work
outside — but nobody wants to take the risk. It’s Pete’s fault. He dared to voice what all of us were thinking. Smitty was busy building barricades, I was hunter-gathering, Alice was doing whatever that girl does — fixing
her makeup, probably — and then Pete went and said it:
“What if the food’s infected?”
“These sandwiches from the shop are sealed.” I’d pointed to my cache
on the table. “I figured we should avoid the stuff in the kitchen. We don’t know what state it’s in.”
“What if it’s the sandwiches that are the problem?” Smitty said. “At
least if we cremate a few burgers, we’ll kill anything in there.”
And so the debate began. A quick examination of the tables of our
unfortunate ex-classmates revealed that they had been eating a complete
cross-section of the Cheery Chomper’s menu and the shop’s refrigerator.
So nothing could be ruled out. If we want to be safe, we eat nothing.
My peanut butter and jelly sandwich is now a distant memory. I nee
d
to eat something. Badly.
“Let’s think about this logically,” I say. “As far as we know, everyone
who went into the café — except present company” — I point to Pete and
Alice — “was affected. Mr. Taylor turned first, the others quite a lot later.
What did Mr. Taylor eat?”
Alice frowns at me. “He didn’t. He came in the door and went straight
into the shop. I remember because the only free seat was at our table next to Shanika, and she was freaking out in case he came and sat beside her.”
“It’s true,” Pete said. “He didn’t eat anything from the shop, either.”
“Well, then.” I shrug. “Mr. T was the first to go zom, so it can’t have
been anything in the food.” I pull a little corner of the plastic wrapping off my sandwich. “He was sick already. He had the flu. Maybe it made him prone to whatever infected him in the café? Maybe that’s why he
turned so fast?”
Smitty, sitting on the back of a chair, juggles three packets of sandwiches. The fillings squish up against the clear plastic and make me feel
sick. “Driver dude didn’t go anywhere near the café. What got him?”
I catch a turkey and stuffing on whole wheat. “The question is who
got him. I think he was bitten — on his wrist, where we bandaged him.
Maybe he was bitten by whoever bashed into the bus. That’s how it
spreads, isn’t it?”
Pete raises an eyebrow. “Is it?”
“Yeah.” I try to look nonchalant. “Traditionally.”
Smitty drops into the seat and fixes me with a gray stare. “But that’s
not the starting point. What infected everyone in the first place?” He
looks around. “Got to be something in here. And Mr. T had the fast track.”
“Ooh!” Alice’s face contorts with the effort of using her brain. “Mr.
Taylor didn’t eat anything, but he drank something. The juice that stupid
vegetable was handing out.”
I look at her as if she’s finally come undone. Then it hits me.
“Carrot Man.”
Pete’s eyes widen. “He was giving out free samples at the door!”
“Oh, you beauty!” Smitty makes a noise that is half-laugh, half-groan.
“That is beyond sick!”
I feel the walls of the Cheery Chomper closing in on me. Could it
be true? Something in the drink made everyone turn?
“Mr. Taylor drank an entire carton of that juice!” Alice thumps the
table. “I heard him say he wanted the vitamin C!”
Pete gulps. “She’s right. He was holding it when he came into the
shop. He chugged the whole thing down and asked the lady behind
the counter if she had a trash bin to put it in.”
“So if the juice was infected” — I bite my knuckle — “who else
drank it?”
“Everyone!” Alice rises in her seat. “We walked in and the carrot was
handing out these samples. God, he was so lame. The whole scam made
me want to vom. Shanika had one drink, Em had two — she tried to
give one to me, but I didn’t want it — I mean, très embarrassant, a carrot man? I wasn’t going to drink it. I was the only one, though.”
“What, all the waiters and everyone?” Smitty says. “Every last person
in this café except you, Malice?”
Alice glares at him and sharpens up her mouth for a retort, but Pete
gets in first.
“She’s telling the truth. I remember the carrot guy came in after
everyone and was handing out the juice to all the staff. Even the cooks
came out and grabbed some. They were all saying how delicious it was.”
“But not you, Pete?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I have allergies.”
I leap out of my chair and, ignoring a fresh onset of dizziness, march
to the entrance. “So where’s Carrot Man now?” I search for what I know
I will not find — a small cart. “Where’s all his stuff? Where’s the juice?”
“If you were handing out zombie juice, would you stick around to see
what happened?” Smitty says.
I return to the table. Pete strips back the plastic from his sandwich
and tucks in.
“So that proves my theory,” he says through a mouthful of egg salad.
“This was deliberate, and they’ve covered up the source. My mother
always told me not to accept anything from strangers.”
I slowly sit and remove my sandwich from its wrapper. I bite into
it cautiously. Smitty shows no fear and dives into his. Alice tears hers
into little strips and eats them one by one, as if this will help. Suddenly Smitty grabs his throat and falls to the ground, choking and groaning.
We ignore him, as we were all absolutely expecting him to do this. He
picks himself up and rejoins us at the table, and we all munch in silence.
I eat a cheese ’n’ pickle, a turkey ’n’ stuffing, two packets of salt ’n’
vinegar crisps, and an apricot muffin, washed down with a Diet Coke.
If we’re wrong about the juice and I’m going to be infected, I’ll do it on a full stomach.
Having eaten, we’re back in the office, the door still propped open with
a chair so the automatic latch doesn’t close and lock from the outside.
Everyone is groaning a little, but not because we’re Undead, more that we
are stuffed to the gills with what my mum would call “processed muck.”
Alice only ate half her sandwich, but then she disappeared into the shop
and got busy with the candy bars again. I counted seven wrappers. Then
she disappeared into the bathrooms. I hope she wasn’t chucking them
up. That’s all we need on the team, a vomit queen. Maybe she just didn’t
want to take any chances with becoming infected, but I’m thinking that
she’s more worried about the size of her butt.
“In order to predict the future, we must learn from the past.”
Pete is standing beside the locked filing cabinet. I sense a lecture
coming on, and make myself comfortable. I think I preferred him when
he was flipping out in the bathroom stall.
“What are you gabbing about now, genius?” Smitty says.
“I told you, we’re being watched.” Pete points to the cabinet. “Help
me break that open. Fifty pence says we open it up and find surveillance
equipment. Recorded footage of what happened here.”
“Fifty pence?” Smitty moves toward the cupboard and snatches up
a snowboard. “Are you in nursery school? Make it fifty pounds and I’m
interested.” He throws me a glance. “With exchange rates these days,
that’s worth more than fifty bucks, you know.” I stare back at him blankly.
Pete’s mouth twitches. “Fifty pounds: Done. If this really is the
breakdown of society as we know it, currency will become useless. But
whatever.”
With a straightened paper clip, Smitty picks at the lock on the top
drawer like he’s picking Pete’s brain. The lock clicks open easily, as do the other two beneath it. Clearly, between the two of us, we have a career as pickpockets to fall back on. How reassuring.
There are three shelves. The bottom drawer is full of boxed files. The
top drawer holds a cash box and a large ball made of rubber bands. But
it is the middle drawer that we are all looking at. It doesn’t pull out, like the other two; it swings open.
Six small TV screens and a large black box that looks like a DVR sit
on the
shelf. They are all switched on. Images of the café, shop, entrance, parking lot, and office are displayed. And on the final screen we can see ourselves from above, huddled around the cabinet.
Pete turns to the camera in the corner of the room. He smiles and
waves at us on the screen.
“I’ll take that fifty quid now, Smitty,” he says.
1 2
My life through a lens.
On screen, my hair looks shameful. Like I have the mange. I quell the
urge to primp in front of the camera. Alice shows no such restraint, and
she doesn’t even need to primp.
“This proves nothing.” Smitty is adamant. “Just because there are
security cameras recording doesn’t mean anyone’s watching us. The
tapes are for robberies, or whatever. Why else would that tosser Gareth
have been guarding his gas station with a baseball bat?”
He’s right, of course. It doesn’t prove a thing — and what’s more, if
there were people spying on us, why on earth would they leave the TVs
here for us to see? Even so, this is way high tech for a roadside café. My skin is crawling.
“It’s good for one thing, though.” Smitty grins at Pete and Alice. “We
get to check up on your stories.”
“What do you mean?” Alice curls her lip.
Smitty points to the DVR. “Like Petey said: We’ve got it all recorded.
What happened here, when and how.”
A shudder runs through me. One thing to hear about it, another
altogether to see it, up close and from multiple angles.
Pete fiddles with some buttons and manages to rewind the record—
ings to the beginning. Each screen has a time and date at the bottom. It
seems they’re on a 24-hour loop; a couple of hours later and we wouldn’t
have got to see anything. But lucky us, we’re just in time.
I close the blind on the window so we can see more clearly, and we
crowd in a semicircle, sitting on some of the boxes of disinfectant. My
right shoulder is pressed against Smitty’s leather-jacketed left shoulder, and as we lean toward the screens his hand brushes mine. He’s warm.
I can’t help feeling grudgingly grateful for his presence. It must be shell-shock. Can’t think of any other reason why I’d feel that way.
“Let the show begin.”
Undead (ARC) Page 10
