it right.
I feel the hot tears rolling down my face, and brace myself on the bike
as the crying comes so suddenly and overwhelmingly. Memories of his
brave smile, his hand growing cold in the hospital bed, and the kind of
helplessness and fear I thought I’d never have to go through again so
soon. Shuddering, bending over onto my elbows, I let it all out. All the
Dad stuff. And the snide looks and snarky words of the ski trip, and Mr.
Taylor and his beaten-up monster face, and the driver and his head in the
snow, and Smitty and how stupid I feel.
And then it passes, and Dad is gone again, and I realize I’m crying
because I know I can’t ride Silvery Blue off into the sunset. There are people relying on me, and for some jacked-up reason I can’t let them down.
I climb off the Ski-Doo and leave the stable, closing the doors behind
me. But not before I’ve pocketed the keys. Because, as Smitty said, you
never know.
All right, back on task. Listen in on their plans and find out what the hell is going on.
I’m creeping past the tower, hugging the walls. I try to sneak a look
in. But it’s not going to happen. Where windows once were, there is
modern brick.
As I edge around, I spot the place where Pete threw the Veggie Juice.
It’s just a white lump of snow now; I can’t even see the blue plastic bag
handles anymore. But I think it’s still there, hibernating until the big
thaw. Above it is the kitchen window, which is open a crack — Lily must
have left it like that to clear the bacon smell, which probably wasn’t too bright considering the zombie sitch, but I’m grateful for it now because I can hear Grace’s low, calm voice punctuated by Michael’s exclamations
and Shaq’s whining. They’re all in the kitchen.
I can’t stay out here too long. Even if I can get close enough to hear
better, there’s no cover. All it will take is for one of them to look out of the window, and I’ll be busted. Not to speak of the dog, wherever he’s lurking. I need to get inside again and find somewhere to hide.
I scoot past the window to the back door, willing it to be open. Turning
the doorknob excruciatingly slowly, I send a silent prayer that no one will be waiting for me on the other side. Amazing how, all things considered, the genius academics still forgot to lock up behind themselves.
My prayers are answered. I’m in the mudroom, which holds nothing
except a coatrack, boots, and a collection of walking sticks and umbrellas.
The door to the kitchen is to my left, and there is another, narrower door to my right.
I creep up to the kitchen door. Grace is saying something about
“adverse situations being expected.” I shake my head and listen closer.
Really, Grace? Did you really expect the world to be overrun by the Undead when you woke up yesterday morning? I jump as I hear Michael’s baritone.
He’s standing right next to the door. He seems to have read my mind,
too, because he’s basically saying out loud what I just said to Grace in
my head.
This will never do. Any moment now, they’ll hear me standing here,
or open the door and see me. What am I supposed to do, crouch beside
the coats and make like a duck jacket? I have to find another way to
eavesdrop.
I pad toward the narrow door. It’s stiff and gives a squeak as I start
to open it. I freeze, hot blood running through my veins, my eyes on the
kitchen door. But it doesn’t move. They’re too wrapped up in their own
conversation.
I ease the door wide open. Steep stairs lead up. A servants’ staircase.
Of course. How else were they going to get breakfast trays full of delights for the masters and mistresses upstairs? It can’t have been fun carrying things up and down there all day.
And then it hits me. A way to get into the kitchen that doesn’t involve
using doors. And it’s quite possibly the dumb est idea I’ve had in the last three days.
Or ever.
I’m upstairs, and I’ve found it. The little hatch in the wall that corresponds to the one we found in the kitchen last night. The truth is, the
servants didn’t carry breakfast trays upstairs every morning. They put
them on a shelf attached to a pulley and let the wonders of Victorian
technology do the work for them.
A dumbwaiter. Basically, a little elevator shaft from the kitchen to
upstairs.
A dumbwanker. Basically, a person who chooses to climb down the
elevator shaft.
That’ll be me, then.
I put my hands on the handle on the bottom of the hatch door and
heave, and it slides up reluctantly. Eerie. A musty smell seeps out. Inside is a black space, just big enough for some foolish person to climb in.
I lean in and look down, half expecting an ancient Scottish banshee to
come rushing up to greet me. There should be a shelf, a little platform
that I could ride down to the kitchen. But the shaft is completely empty,
which, now that I think about it, is way better. The last thing I want to
do is get trapped.
There are wooden bars on the shaft walls, a ready-made ladder. That’s
my way down. I feel for the flashlight stuffed down the back of my waistband. I’m a genius. Of course, I knew I’d be crawling up one dark tunnel
only to be crawling down another. I shine the flashlight down the shaft.
The dust clutches at the back of my throat and I step back, trying to stop myself from coughing.
Well? Think you can you do this, Roberta? I hear him in my head. Can you?
Hell, yeah.
I stow the flashlight in my waistband again and climb in, testing the
first wooden bar with one foot. It seems to be holding. I lift my other leg over and sit on the ledge, my hand reaching up for another bar. Good so far. Then before I can really believe it, I’m putting my full weight on the wooden struts and lowering myself down, already feeling for the next rail with my foot, moving hand over hand in a way that totally
goes against the panic that’s rising in my chest. It’s almost like, if I keep moving, I won’t fall. And if I don’t keep moving, I’ll chicken out and — Shit!
A bar gives way, my right hand snatches air, and I swing around,
losing one of my footholds. I shoot out the free hand and foot, bracing
myself against the opposite wall like a cat in a chimney.
That was quite noisy.
I look down the shaft, absolutely expecting the hatch below to open.
But it doesn’t.
A salty bead of sweat runs into my eye. I blink it away and steady my
breathing. Keep going.
I move again, slower this time, testing out the old wood before I trust
it with my life. And then, suddenly, I can hear muffled voices. They’re
still in the kitchen, and they’re still talking. Great. Now just don’t say anything important before I get there . . .
And then I am there, at the hatch. There are three edges of light
where the door doesn’t quite meet the wall. I shine the flashlight down.
The shaft continues a few feet below the hatch, and my grateful foot
touches solid ground. The muted smell of bacon competes with dust and
dead mouse. The hatch is at chest level; I bend down and put my ear to
the door. If they do open the hatch, I’ll look like a head on a platter.
“. . . our primary objective should be to secure it.”
It’s Grace. Her voice is low but she’s clear enough. What’s she talking
“We have to contact someone!”
I jump. Once again, Beardy-Michael has exercised his remarkable talent for unknowingly standing right beside me. I hold my breath.
He continues. “We’ve got to be proactive. We can’t just sit around on
our arses waiting for the world to end!”
Too right, Michael, I think. But . . . huh? World to end? Is this everywhere? How does he know that?
“Useless!” It’s Shaq. “It’s useless contacting anyone until we’ve secured
the product! Don’t you listen, Michael? Don’t you see the nonsense in our
position? We’ve got nothing, nothing at the moment! Unless we can get
in there” — there is an emphatic thump — “we can’t possibly hope to have any leverage with these people!”
“Reality check, Shaq.” Michael’s voice gets quieter, and I can hear him
walking across the kitchen. “Thanks to you, we can’t get in there.”
They’re talking about the tower. Bingo.
“Hidden in plain sight!” Shaq’s voice rises to a whine. “That’s what you
always said. No fancy keypad on the door to raise suspicion, key hung up
in the pantry behind the door! I was only following the rules!”
“We have no guarantees they’ll come here anyway.” Grace’s cool
voice cuts through the hysteria. “They may well have had some counter—
measures in place before they let this go nuclear.”
There’s silence in the kitchen.
I close my eyes . Nuclear? What the hell? The zombies are gonna be dropping bombs? That’s it, this is not real. I’m dreaming. The last two days have just been a trauma-induced nightmare. Any minute now, I’ll
be naked on stage in front of the entire school and the boy I used to like in kindergarten will be trying to make me eat a huge bowl of creamed spinach. It cannot get any worse than this.
I open my eyes. Get a grip. Nuclear is an expression; she’s not talking about bombs. But Shaq said product. What product? Some kind of anti-zombie protection? Or . . .
The pieces fall into place. I lean back against the wall, feeling like the biggest ignoramus in the world.
This has got nothing to do with zombies.
Product.
This is about drugs.
Product is what drug cooks call drugs, isn’t it? Grace, Michael, and
Shaq are drug dealers! Or manufacturers, to be precise. They are cook—
ing up some weirdo pill in the tower. The boxes of disinfectant in the
stable — they probably use that in their drug kitchen; it makes total
sense.
And they need the product to have leverage with . . . someone who wants what they have. Some drug overlord? I imagine a guy with a big black mustache, a shiny suit, and several scantily clad women draped
over him. Those sorts of people kill other people. They will not be put
off by a mere zombie apocalypse. They will come here, and they will kill
whoever they find. They won’t care that we’re only school kids and not
drug cooks. They’ll shoot us first and ask questions later. We need to get out of here, and fast. Take our chances with the Undead. At least they don’t have automatic weapons.
“What of our moral obligation?” It’s Grace.
“Don’t make me laugh!” Michael laughs anyway. He’s back at his post,
right by the dumbwaiter hatch. “We didn’t put the stuff out there! We
created this, but we didn’t put it on the street!”
“We gave it to them knowing full well what they might do,” Grace
says from the other side of the kitchen. “And we have the power to undo
the damage.”
“I’m more interested in staying alive,” growls Michael. “Don’t talk to
me about morals. We did this for the best reasons.”
“Yeah” — Shaq makes a choking sound — “and for a bucketful of
money.”
OK, that’s it. I’m out of here. I straighten up and feel for the nearest
rung. I’m going to climb out of this shaft, and we’re all getting out of the drug kitchen. Now.
“Just remember . . .” Grace’s voice is loud and clear. She must have
moved toward Michael because it’s almost like she’s whispering in my
ear, she’s so close. “Whenever you see one of those monsters, it’s on you, Michael. On me, on Shaq, and on you. We created them. Regardless of what the company has done now. If we get into the tower, we get the
antidote and the power is back in our hands. We disinfect this place
from top to bottom, remove any evidence we were ever here, then we
disappear. Nobody else dies, we get the rest of our money, and everything goes back to normal. But to make any of this work, we need that
antidote.”
Antidote?
It feels like the floor has dropped away. I grip the wooden bars tightly,
the walls closing in on me as my head spins. Just get out . . . make sense of this later . . .
I take the first couple of steps up. One foot after the other, one hand
and then the next . . .
I’m halfway up when the forgotten flashlight, top-heavy and balancing precariously in my elastic waistband, falls. It ricochets off the
opposite wall and lands on the floor with a deafening thud.
“What the hell was that?” Michael shouts.
I climb like zombies are chasing me. Fast ones.
2 3
Oh, you bet I move fast.
If they’re zombie-creating mad scientists, it won’t take them too long
to figure out that I’m hiding in the dumb dumbwaiter shaft.
As I reach the upstairs hatch, there’s a noise from below. I glance
down. No square of light, no shout. They haven’t got the door open yet.
But they will. I clamber out of the hatch and close it. As if that will make a difference. It’s not like they’re going to follow me up the shaft; they’ll use their evil superbrains and come on up the staircase instead.
I run to the grand staircase, and I’m halfway down when a door
slams. I duck. Somewhere downstairs there is movement. Please don’t
come this way. I pause, waiting for running feet, but none come. Got to keep going. If I don’t move now, I’ll miss my shot.
I scurry down the staircase and sprint toward the basement door.
There’s a wooden chair propped under the handle and I fling it aside,
open the door, and take the steps two at a time.
“We have to go!”
Lily looks up at me. Cam is still in his box-nest.
“Where’s everyone else?” I look frantically around the dimly lit
basement.
Lily stands up. “You got out of the chute?”
“Yes,” I say impatiently. As if this wasn’t completely obvious! “Where
are the others? We have to go now!”
“Pete said something about a tunnel. Alice and Smitty are playing
spin the bottle.”
I hear Alice’s unmistakable fake giggle coming from behind the wall-curtain. Rage flushes through my body. Here am I, risking life and limb
for them, and they’re dicking around?
“Get Cam and anything you need,” I order Lily. “We leave, now!”
“Where are we going?” Lily calls after me, but I ignore her and head
through the wall-curtain. It’s an excellent question, but I am not going
to waste time answering it now.
Alice and Smitty are sitting cross-legged on the floor. In between
them is a bottle.
“Get up,” I spit. “Get Pete. We’re leaving.”
Smitty scrambles to his feet. “What’s going on? You heard them?”
I nod grimly. “I heard them all right. They made the zombies. In the
tower. I don’t know how or why, but they created a drug or something
that made everyone turn. Somebody paid them to.”
“What?” Smitty is aghast.
“Are you off your rocker?” Alice giggles.
“If you don’t believe me, fine. But now they know one of us was listening in, and we have to leave before the real bad guys get here, the ones they sold the drug to.” I turn and run back into the basement, not bothering to see if I’ve convinced them.
Lily is still bending over Cam.
“Something’s wrong,” she mutters. “He won’t wake up.”
“Carry him!” I shout.
Smitty, Alice, and Pete appear through the wall-curtain.
“What’s this about zombie-making in the tower?” Pete says.
“That’s what they’re doing here?” Lily says.
“And all of this is a huge experiment?” Pete almost looks exhilarated.
“So it would seem. No time to make sense of it now,” I say. “There are
two Ski-Doos and a sled in the stable through the courtyard. We make a
run for it. I take the first Ski-Doo with Cam and Lily on the back.” I glare at Smitty and Alice. “Pete drives the other. You’re free to fight over who gets to ride in the sled behind.”
I’m up the stairs before they can comment, and I’m relieved to find
the door still open. Pausing for a second at the end of the corridor while the others line up behind me, I listen. A door slams, somewhere way off, upstairs maybe. Good. Now’s our chance.
“This way!” I whisper, and head across the hall to the main door. It’s
bolted above and below, the way we originally left it. With a glance up
at the staircase, I reach for the high bolt while Smitty scrabbles at my
feet for the lower one. He’s quicker than me, and first to grab the handle and turn.
The door does not open.
“Pull it!” Alice cries, elbowing Smitty out of the way and clasping the
handle in her slim hands. It’s useless, it’s locked. By a key. Another key, a key we don’t have.
“Check the basement!” There’s a shout from somewhere above. Michael.
“Back door,” Smitty says firmly.
Alice makes a dash for it and we all follow . . . except Lily and Cam,
who are crouching on the floor.
“Come on!” I hiss at them.
“He’s sick.” Lily looks up at me with big eyes. As if to prove her point,
Undead (ARC) Page 20
