by Lily Herne
We backtracked, but another knot was approaching from that direction, as if drawn by the moans of the others. Both routes were blocked, and from the sounds of the clumping feet behind us it seemed that their ghastly moaning was summoning more and more of them. Ash and I were now practically carrying Thabo between us and I knew that we wouldn’t be able to continue much further. Ash stopped dead and unsheathed the panga. ‘No choice but to fight!’ he said.
The roar cut through the moans, followed by the most welcome sound I’d ever heard: ‘Yippee-kai-yay, zombie suckers!’ Ginger yelled.
Heads bounced towards us, spewing that strange spaghetti stuff, as Ginger cut a path through the dead.
‘Get inside!’ Saint shouted at us, appearing from behind Ginger and pointing us towards the bookstore, its entrance just metres away.
‘We’ll be trapped!’ Ash yelled back.
‘No choice! There’s too many!’
Saint, Ash and Ginger sliced and hacked at the tide of bodies, while I manoeuvred Thabo inside. I helped him stumble towards the back of the store, but his strength was failing fast, and we only just made it to the children’s section.
I raced back to the front of the store and started edging the heavy glass door shut, its hinges screaming from disuse. At the last moment, Ash, Ginger and Saint slipped inside.
Ginger shut off the chainsaw, and we were left listening to the sound of the Rotters moaning outside, several of them bumping against the glass in a vain attempt to get to us.
‘Now, that’s what I call cutting it fine,’ Ginger said.
I jogged back to Thabo, Saint and Ginger close behind.
Saint slumped down in exhaustion. ‘What the hell have you got us into now, Zombie Bait?’
‘It’s my fault,’ Thabo said, trying again to grin. Sweat was beading on his forehead, and, more worryingly, his skin was taking on a greyish tone. ‘Blame me.’
Saint took in his injuries for the first time. ‘What happened?’
‘The Guardians shot him,’ I said.
‘Wait . . . What? Why would the Guardians need guns?’
‘We’ve seen them, Saint,’ I said. ‘We know what they are.’
‘And what are they?’
Thabo and I shared a glance. ‘Teenagers,’ I said.
‘Teenagers? What have you been smoking?’
‘It’s true.’ Ash said, returning from the kitchen with a pot of water and several clean tea towels.
‘And the first ones that came? You think they were also teenagers?’
Ash shrugged. ‘Who knows, but I’m pretty sure it’s why they did all those experiments on the kids. Trying to find hosts that would take whatever that spaghetti stuff is without it destroying their bodies.’
I shuddered again.
‘How many are there do you think? Guardians, I mean?’ Saint asked.
‘There are the ones from the Lottery, I guess,’ Ash said. ‘Lele, you knew that Guardian outside. Was he one of the Lottery winners?’
I nodded.
‘There must be shedloads if you think about it,’ Ginger said. ‘All the ones that bring building materials and food into the city. Weird to think they’re, like, our age, innit?’
Thabo groaned, and his eyelids fluttered.
‘Guys!’ I said. ‘Thabo needs help.’
‘We’re going to have to stop the bleeding and clean that wound,’ Ash said to Thabo.
Thabo looked up at him and nodded, but his eyes were turning glassy.
Slowly, I helped Thabo out of his jacket. I bit back the gasp of shock – his black T-shirt was sodden with blood.
‘Ooooh, mate,’ Ginger said as I rolled Thabo’s T-shirt up as gently as I could. The wound looked surprisingly small, nothing but a dark hole just beneath his ribs, but the blood that oozed out of it was black.
Ash tried to hide the dismay on his face – but he didn’t do a good enough job of it. He must have seen countless wounds during the war, and the fact that he was horrified didn’t bode well for Thabo.
‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ Thabo said.
‘Just try to relax,’ Ash replied.
Ash crouched next to me and started to clean the wound, the water running bloody instantly.
Thabo took my hand. ‘Lele,’ he said. ‘You must get out of here. Just leave me.’
‘No ways! Don’t even say that.’
He looked up at Ash. ‘Tell her. Get her out of here.’
‘We’re not leaving you, Thabo,’ Ash said, taking off his jacket and making a pillow for his head. ‘That’s non-negotiable.’
Thabo settled back and closed his eyes, his breathing becoming steadily more laboured.
There was a banging sound on the windows. Ginger got to his feet and peered around the bookshelves.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘There’s even more of them,’ Ginger said, shoving a hand through his ginger curls. ‘It’s just like Dawn of the Dead, innit?’ He looked down at Thabo. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ he said, ‘we’ll get you out of here.’
‘How though?’ I asked. ‘I mean, say we get out of the mall, how will we get him through the Deadlands?’
‘We’ll need some kind of vehicle,’ Ash said.
‘The wagon?’
Ash nodded. ‘But we’ll need to get the horses.’
We shared a glance. Both of us knew that the odds were heavily stacked against us.
‘First things first,’ Saint said. ‘We’ve got to get him past those things outside.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Ginger said.
‘You have?’ Saint said. ‘What?’
‘You’ll see,’ he replied. ‘There’s a Coke machine back there, right?’
‘Is that all you think about, Ginger?’ Saint asked.
Ginger winked at her, grabbed his bag and his chainsaw and jogged off in the direction of the coffee shop.
The banging on the glass had intensified and it sounded as if the Rotters were now using more than just their fists.
‘You think they can break through?’ I asked.
‘I doubt it,’ Saint said to me.
‘Should we move Thabo to the storeroom just in case?’ I pointed towards the back of the shop.
‘I don’t think we should move him anywhere right now. At least not until the bleeding has stopped,’ Ash said. ‘That wound looks –’
The sound of shattering glass swallowed Ash’s words.
It happened so quickly that a bunch of Rotters were inside the store before Ash and Saint were on their feet. I squeezed Thabo’s hand and hared after them.
Ginger ran through from the kitchen, revving his chainsaw, feet thumping across the carpet tiles. Ash was slicing away with his panga, but more and more Rotters were crashing through the splintering glass, kicking paperbacks out of the way, their sightless gazes seemingly fixed in Thabo’s direction.
Ginger sliced his chainsaw in an arc, sending several scattering at once, but then it sputtered and died.
‘You run out of petrol?’ Ash yelled at him.
‘Kind of,’ he said, ‘I – watch out!’
Another wall of bodies lurched forwards, stumbling over the Rotters Ginger and Ash had just cut down. They didn’t fight – they acted as if Saint, Ash and Ginger weren’t actually present – but their shrunken eyes seemed to be fixed on where Thabo lay.
I flung my knife, hitting a Rotter square in the chest (it didn’t even falter), and quickly looked around for another weapon. There was nothing but books. I grabbed a bunch of Twilight graphic novels from a display table and started chucking them at the heads of the Rotters. To my right, Saint was doing her best, but she was being forced back as wave after wave of the dead surged forward. I caught sight of her head disappearing as she stumbled backwards, and then, as the crowd of the dead parted, I saw her being pushed to the ground, her leg caught behind one of the shelves at an awkward angle.
Her scream melded with the Rotters’ moans.
‘Ginger!’ I yelled. ‘Saint
’s down!’ But he was too busy trying to fend off the Rotters with the blade of his chainsaw to do anything.
Ash was now a one-man shield between Thabo and the Rotters, and he couldn’t wield the panga fast enough to stop them. The Twilight display depleted, I grabbed a hardback book about Nelson Mandela and threw it like a frisbee. It conked off the head of the Rotter closest to me, but there were way too many. I skirted around Ash and flung my body on top of Thabo’s, wrapping my arms around him, waiting for the Rotters to get to us.
But they never came.
An immense roar shattered the air, and at first I thought that Ginger had managed to fire up his chainsaw again. I stood up and edged forward in time to see two motorbikes crashing through the empty display window, scattering paperbacks everywhere, wheels crunching over shards of broken glass. They skidded in a tight arc, sending Rotter bodies flying, the stench of burning rubber and exhaust thick in the air.
As the engines cut out, I recognised Paul astride one of the bikes, and it was then that some part of me realised that this was the source of the ear-splitting sound I’d heard in the mall when I’d first met Ash.
Paul’s robe was gone, and he was dressed in a slim-fitting black silk suit, blindingly white starched shirt and a black tie. Leaping from his bike in a single movement, he gestured dismissively to the Rotters. One of them snapped its toothless maw at him, but it shrank back when he approached, and then, one by one, the Rotters stumbled out of the store. But to be honest I wasn’t really watching them anymore; my attention had been caught by the other Guardian.
‘Jamale,’ I said, my voice escaping in a whisper. But it wasn’t the terrified Jamale I remembered from the back of the wagon; the Jamale who hadn’t been able to control his bladder. This version was standing with his back straight, his face emotionless, oozing confidence and self-control. Like Paul he was dressed in an expensive silk suit – although his was white – and the handle of a gun stuck out of his belt.
‘Guys!’ Saint called from behind a bookshelf. She tried to get to her feet, but her leg wouldn’t hold her up. ‘Ow!’ She crawled forward, eyes wide as she took in Paul and Jamale.
‘They’re Guardians,’ I called to her.
‘Yeah,’ Ash added, still struggling to catch his breath, ‘Guardians with guns.’
‘My knee,’ Saint said, voice trembling with pain and shock. ‘I think it’s dislocated.’
‘Just stay there, Saint,’ Ash said.
‘Don’t you touch her!’ Ginger roared as Jamale pulled out his gun, but instead of moving towards us he walked over to stand by the shattered display window. He showed absolutely no sign that he recognised me or had heard Ginger’s warning; his dead eyes stared straight ahead.
‘Please, Paul,’ I said, the tears now falling freely down my cheeks. ‘Thabo’s badly hurt. We have to get him back to the enclave.’
‘I can help him,’ Paul said moving as if to approach me.
‘Don’t take another step,’ Ash said, weighing his panga in his hands.
‘You can’t stop us.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Ash replied, taking a step forward. ‘Just watch me.’
‘Stop!’ I yelled to Ash. ‘He’ll shoot you!’
For a couple of seconds I was terrified that Ash wasn’t going to listen, that he’d go for Paul anyway. He didn’t drop the panga, or lose the look of cold anger in his eyes, but he stayed where he was. I took a deep shuddering breath and turned back to Paul. ‘What do you mean you can help Thabo. How?’
‘How do you think, Lele? He can become one of us, as we had planned.’
‘What? No!’
‘Then he will die,’ Paul said, again in that same lifeless tone. He waved his hand towards the shop’s doorway. ‘And he will join the dead ones.’
‘But I can’t let you do that to him!’
The Paul thing cocked his head on one side in a gesture that was more alien than human. ‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re . . . you’re monsters!’ It was the only word I could come up with right then to describe them. What else were the Guardians?
‘It is not us who are the monsters, Lele.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
Paul laughed his empty laugh. ‘People kill each other, brutalise each other, do far worse things to each other than we ever could. Like what is happening in the city now. It is not us sending people out of the enclave to become the living dead. We are not the ones filled with hate.’
‘But . . . people aren’t just all about hate!’
‘That is not what we have seen.’
I glanced at Ash, who was watching me carefully. ‘But . . . what about love?’
‘Love?’ Paul said, and for a second I thought he was going to smile. ‘There is no such thing.’
Although the Rotters had scattered, I could still hear their moans in the background. ‘If Thabo dies he will become one of the dead ones. Let me save him, Lele,’ Paul continued.
I didn’t know what to do. I thought about what had happened to Gran, and the thought of Thabo turning into a Hatchling was too much to bear. I looked over to Ash, Ginger and Saint.
‘What should I do?’ I whispered to them.
‘You don’t have a choice,’ Paul said.
Thabo let out a moan of agony. The carpet beneath him was sodden with his blood.
‘It is now or never, Lele.’
‘No!’ I said. But when Paul glided over to Thabo, I didn’t try and stop him. ‘Watch,’ he said.
I didn’t really want to see what Paul was going to do, but something compelled me to lift my head.
Paul bent down, picked up a sliver of glass and nicked his finger. A bright bead of blood bubbled at the top of it.
‘You can bleed?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘We are more like you than you think, Lele. Or, should I say, you are more like us.’
He sank to his haunches and pressed his finger to the wound in Thabo’s stomach. Thabo winced, but he didn’t open his eyes. It was clear he was past feeling much of anything.
Paul stood up.
‘That’s it?’ I asked.
‘Watch,’ Paul said again.
I moved closer, and caught a flicker of silver deep in the depths of the wound. I couldn’t make much sense of what I was seeing at first, but as the blood dried and clotted, I could make out fine tendrils, glinting silver versions of the spaghetti stuff I’d seen on the bone mountain, twirling and knitting together inside the wound.
‘What is that stuff?’
‘It is what we are,’ Paul said.
I watched as Thabo’s body shivered, the hairs on his arms standing up. For a second his eyes opened wide, and then they shut again, and he was still.
‘It will take time, but he will heal,’ Paul said.
‘He’ll live?’ I asked.
‘Not quite as you mean it, but yes, in a sense, he will live.’
‘So what happens now?’ Ash asked. ‘Are you going to kill us?’
‘Kill you?’ Paul said, his blank voice for once sounding almost human. ‘No. We have been watching you for some time. We know what you are. You must join with us. We can help you fulfil your true potential.’
‘You serious?’ Saint asked, face still vivid with the agony she was feeling. ‘I’d rather die.’
‘If that is your choice,’ Paul said. ‘Then you must die.’
‘Why can’t you just let us go?’ I said. But even as I said it I knew why. We knew who they were, what they were. There was a reason they covered their bodies and faces with the robes. Thabo had been right: if the people in the enclave knew what the Guardians actually did with the teenage bodies, who knew how they would react?
Paul looked over at Jamale, and without hesitating Jamale aimed his gun at Ginger’s head.
‘Don’t do this, Paul!’ I said. ‘Please! There must be another way. We won’t say anything, please, just let us go!’
He stared at me through those soulless eyes. ‘No.’
&nb
sp; ‘Wait!’ Ginger said.
Paul jerked his head in Ginger’s direction.
‘Mate,’ Ginger said, ‘we can’t stop you doing what you’re going to do, but can I ask you a favour?’
Paul glanced at Jamale, and again they seemed to communicate without words. ‘What is it you want to do?’
‘Well, like, if you’re going to kill us or whatever, I was wondering if I could have a last request.’
‘What?’
Ginger held up his bag, which clinked as he opened it up.
‘I’d like a last drink of my Coke if you don’t mind. And I think Ash would probably like one of his smokes.’ Ginger looked over at Ash. ‘Isn’t that right, mate?’
Ash narrowed his eyes slightly, but then nodded at Ginger. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I could do with a cigarette . . . sure.’
Ginger pulled a couple of Coke bottles out of his bag and flipped off the lids. He glanced at Saint. ‘You know how you’re always saying this stuff is bad for me?’ he said, looking down at the two bottles filled with unusually yellow liquid.
‘Yeah,’ she said, still dazed.
‘I don’t think it’s me it’s going to harm.’
It took a split second. Ginger threw the bottles as hard as he could at the science fiction section, where they smashed into pieces, the whiff of petrol engulfing the shop as almost simultaneously Ash threw his lighter. There was a whoosh as the petrol ignited, the rainbow shimmer of fumes blossoming into flame.
Jamale moved to shoot, but Saint was too quick for him. She lashed out with her chains, catching him around the neck, and Ginger whirled around and kicked him so hard that the Guardian’s body tumbled backwards and out of the window.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Ash sliced at Paul with his panga, whacking him in his side. But, bizarrely, Paul didn’t bother to fight back. Instead he let his body crash into the bookshelf behind him.
‘You’ll be back, Lele,’ he said, shooting me a brief, cold smile, and then, with an eerie alien speed, he got to his feet and ran to the front of the store.
The flames were eating through the books faster than I would have thought possible. The sprinklers hissed and sputtered into life, but they were no match for the thick smoke, and within seconds the water dried up – a casualty of ten years of disuse.
