I jump onto one of the plastic stools and scramble on top of the counter, ski pole aloft, my eyes darting — below, then to the corners of the kitchen, looking for a dark shadow, a nook, a cranny where evil lurks. The light strobes make everything into monsters.
Smitty giggles. He hasn’t moved.
“All clear?” He’s flat-out laughing now. My irritation makes me bold; I leap off the counter into the kitchen. It’s empty. I stroll up to the counter door and swing it open.
“Want me to do all the work?” I saunter out past him, controlling my breath, not letting him see that I’m bothered.
“Hey, losers,” Alice hisses. “What about up there?” She’s pointing to the rooms down the corridor.
Before I think about it too much, I’m walking up stained blue carpet. I call to Smitty, “You take the men’s, I’ll take the ladies’.”
“No, this time we go together.” He’s by my side. I hate that I’m grateful.
There’s nobody in the bathrooms. After we’ve checked them, we wait while Alice does what a girl’s gotta do. She absolutely refused to go on the bus. I know where she’s coming from, but man, that’s some bladder control.
A storage room beyond the bathrooms is empty. Well, empty of people, laptops, and monsters. The door is ajar, and the light is on — which I can’t help feeling is strange — but there’s nothing in there except boxes of cleaning supplies and toilet paper.
Back in the corridor, there’s only one room left, and it’s marked STAFF ONLY. Smitty tries the door, but it doesn’t open.
“Da fuh —?” He kicks out at it halfheartedly. There’s a keypad on the wall with a little red light. Seems like the Cheery Chomper might have something worth protecting other than 10-percent-off-your-next-visit coupons. “You!” Smitty points at Pete. “Do something.”
“Me?” Pete stares at him. “What am I, R2-D2? Just because I’m the brains of this particular outfit, do you think I can circumnavigate a digital keypad locking system?” He holds a finger aloft and walks toward the keypad. “Excuse me while I access the security files through my wires.” He sticks his finger on the keypad and jolts around a bit, eyes flashing. It’s quite a performance.
“You should get an award for lame.” Alice pushes past him. “Place like this, they’ll keep it simple. Anything too complicated and the pondlife who work here wouldn’t be able to remember it.” She types 1234. For a second, I think she’s onto something. But the little light stays red, and the door won’t budge. She tries 0123. Same deal.
“We should just smash it,” Smitty says.
“No!” I say. “What if it breaks and the door still won’t open?”
He makes a face. “I mean, we should smash the door.”
“And then what?” I counter. “This is a pretty good spot to hide. It’s warmer than the bus, we’ve got food and running water and who knows what else behind that door. But if we smash the door down, it means we can’t lock it again. We won’t be secure.”
“There’s got to be a window in that room,” says Alice. “Or maybe another door.” She turns to me. “Go outside and look. When you get in, open the door for us.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I mock-salute. “Because I’m the expendable one? Does anyone want to take a vote on who we should risk here?”
“Oh, give it a rest.” She acts bored. “Take him with you.” She thumbs at Smitty. “You know you’ll end up going — why waste time?” She pouts. She has lip gloss on. When the hell did she think to freshen up her makeup? There’s shimmery eye shadow and long black lashes, too. She’s one crazy chick. Mascary.
I clamp my ski pole to my side. It’s oh-so-tempting to make an Alice kebab right now, but then I would be guilty of time-wasting. Smitty, as is his habit, is already halfway out the door. I tut pathetically at Alice, wishing once more for the retort that rarely comes, and follow Smitty back into the snow like the lunatic I am.
After the warmth of the café, the cold hits my face like a splash of ice water; the wind has picked up and the snow swirls around the entranceway. I cast a quick look around the parking lot. Smitty doesn’t pause much to check for movement, but ducks around the corner of the building, following a path to the rear. I start to follow, but something jars in the corner of my eye, and I turn back. I look at our bus.
The door is open.
I back into the wall. Pete shut the door; I know he did, I saw him. I saw him because I was going to shut it myself, but he beat me to it.
I stare at the bus, looking for movement. Everything seems still. My eyes drop to the snow in front of the bus door — can I see footprints? The snow is too messed up to be able to make anything out. But the fact remains, the door is open and that means someone opened it. Gareth? No — can’t be, he would have closed it behind him, surely? Someone come to rescue us? Then why can’t I see them? They would have appeared by now. I look over my shoulder back into the café. Alice is in the shop, nom-nomming a candy bar; Pete is nowhere to be seen. He’s probably still trying to bypass the keypad lock, no matter what he says. Anyway, they’re useless to me. I turn the other way, and nearly jump out of my boots.
“Hello!” Smitty is waving a hand in my face. “What are you doing here? There’s a door around the back and I think I can get us in —” He stops when he sees my expression. “What’s wrong?”
I point to the bus and he whips around. His face drops.
“We closed the door, didn’t we?”
“Pete did,” I say.
Smitty sinks back against the wall with me. “Anyone on board?”
I shake my head. “Not that I’ve seen. But maybe they don’t want to be seen.”
“Balls.” He sighs. “We have to check it out, don’t we?”
“Maybe send Alice?”
He chuckles quietly. “Yeah, that’ll happen.”
“Well,” I say, “with all the abuse that door’s been through in the last twenty-four hours . . . maybe it malfunctioned or something? Maybe Pete didn’t hit the button hard enough, or maybe something got caught in the door and it swung open and we just didn’t notice . . .”
We look at the bus a little longer.
“Come on, then.” Smitty leads the way to the bus. He climbs up the steps and I follow, with legs of granite and a dragging sense of dread in my gut. The seats greet us silently, our home away from home, familiar and sickening at the same time. We stop at the first row; it’s impossible to see if we’re on our own, but there are no obvious monsters swinging from the overhead lockers. Yeah, that much we knew already. Smitty turns to me, shrugs, and before I know it, he’s running — screaming — down the aisle at full speed, at a volume that makes me shrink in my jacket. He reaches the backseat, crashes against it, and ricochets off and up toward me again, still screaming. What the hell? When he reaches me, he swings around, hands outstretched like a crazed magician revealing the empty hat.
“Ta-da!”
“What are you doing?” I gasp, eyes behind him, looking for the monsters that he’s unearthed.
“Don’t you think this creeping around is getting old?” His eyes flash, like he’s totally amped. “Flush ’em out, knock ’em down!”
The bathroom door flies open with a bang; Smitty hits the floor like a six-year-old playing ring-around-the-rosie.
The bathroom is empty. He recovers, but it’s too late to save face. I laugh a little too hysterically, sinking into a crouch on the floor. He looks aghast, but then he laughs, too, the pair of us rocking back and forth on the floor like we’ve been hitting the crazy juice.
It feels so good. But I stop just before the bubbly mania segues into the crying type, because it might.
“There’s nobody here.” I stand up and skip past him. “Must have been a problem with the door. We should make sure it stays shut.”
We barricade the door with a c
ouple of skis wedged against the curb, and return to our original quest — the back door of the Cheery Chomper.
“Reassuring to know that all this time we’ve been gone, Malice and Petey haven’t sent out the search party,” Smitty says.
I pull up my hood, mmm yes, and we plow through the snow to the rear of the building. There’s a single-paned window, with blinds down, and a plain door with a normal lock. No digipad here. Smitty bends down to the lock.
“Gimme your plastic,” he says.
“Pardon me?”
He looks up, snaps his fingers. “The AmEx will do, but you should know that generally it’s not so widely accepted here in the UK.”
I redden. How does he know I have a credit card?
“OK, it’s freezing and we don’t have time to get all grumpy — remember when we had our boot fittings back on the first day?” He makes a squirly mouth. “I went through your stuff. Sorry. I didn’t take anything.”
Blood rushes to my head with rage. “You did what?”
“Nothing personal.” Smitty shrugs. “We’re all cooped up in that stupid ski lodge, no cash, what’s a boy to do?” He thinks he’s being so cute. “I was going to borrow a tenner for beer, but unluckily for me you didn’t have any dosh. Hey, it’s all irrelevant now.”
“Like hell it is.” I glare at him.
“I didn’t even know you then,” he sighs. “Anyway, hand over the card.”
I will do no such thing. Fury and violation whip up around me like the whirling snow and stick me to the spot. Smitty stands up and stares at me, his face passive, the blue-gray eyes almost sorrowful.
“I’m a doof.” He lays a hand on my arm. My first impulse is to throw it off, but I search his face and, incredibly, he’s genuine. “I should never have gone through your pockets.” There’s no trace of sarcasm, and I’m looking really hard. Then he allows a small smile to creep onto his lips. “I just thought you were a Yank, so you were bound to be loaded.”
Ugh! My first impulse was right. I pull my arm away from his reach. “I’m not a ‘Yank’!” I shout, as if this is the issue. I stomp toward the door, unzip my jacket, and reach inside for my red Chinese silk purse. My dad brought it back from one of his work trips overseas. It houses a credit card, Band-Aids, lip balm, a tampon, and a small roll of emergency quarters. Not that a quarter would do me any good in this cold, damp, stupid country. As my face burns and anger continues to bubble inside my chest, I slot the card between the door and the wall, and wiggle it.
“You need to —”
“Back off!” I roar. He thinks I’m some dumb American? He thinks he can bat those long lashes and I’ll simper and forgive him? I wedge the corner of the card into the place where the latch is snug in its slot, and rattle the doorknob.
“How come you speak like one, then?” Smitty asks.
I ignore him and concentrate on my task.
“A Yank,” he says helpfully. “You sound like one, or almost. Not that I have anything against Yanks, you understand.”
“Really?” I look up. “That’s great to know, thank you so much.” I get back to the lock. “If you must know, I’m British. I was born here and I grew up here. We moved to America when I was nine because of my mum’s stupid job. We moved back here last month. And blimey, it’s just been so bloody brilliant to be back.”
Smitty kicks the snow. “Things have changed since you were last here, yeah?”
“Not at all.” I tilt the card a little. “It’s all exactly how I remember it. Miserable weather, smart-ass boys.” I feel something shift in the lock. Yes! One more wiggle of the card and the bolt springs back into place, the handle turns, and Houston, we have liftoff . . .
“You did it!” Smitty can’t believe it, and frankly, neither can I.
“Just a little trick I picked up in the ’hood,” I mutter, and pull the door open.
We bundle in way too quickly, given that we don’t know what’s waiting for us, but it’s too cold to hang outside.
The small room is greenish-gray, like a hospital. There’s a dirty, paisley-patterned couch, and a chaotic mess of a desk. The room smells musty, as if it’s been shut up for days, and there’s a layer of dust on everything. Boxes — filled with large, blue bottles of disinfectant — are piled high on either side of the room. It’s immediately obvious that we’re here alone. If anyone is hiding behind the couch, they’re anorexic. I check anyway, then close the door to the outside. The latch snaps into place; we’re safe. Well, unless there are any dribbling fiends wielding credit cards to jimmy the lock.
We look for the obvious — a phone that works, a computer, a stash of weapons — and come up short. It’s discouraging in the extreme: kind of like waking up Christmas morning and finding the presents under the tree are the same as what you got last year. And broken.
“Votes for leaving Malice and Petey in there?” Smitty stands by the door to the café.
I don’t smile. He’s not off the hook with me yet. Not by a mile.
“Sadly, the food’s that way, too.” Smitty unlatches the door. Pete is still bending over the keypad. I bet he’s been at it all this time.
“Gareth?” he says. “Laptop?”
“Nope and nope,” I say. “No PC, either. I guess we traveled back in time to before they invented proper offices.”
“Hmm,” Pete says. “The laptop would have been nice, but the wireless has gone AWOL anyway. I tried to pick it up on Smitty’s smart phone when we got here. Now Alice is climbing on tables, trying to get a signal.” He waves a hand in the direction of the seating area. “Nothing. Is there a landline?”
“Like everything else around here, dead.” Smitty holds a white plastic receiver in his hand. “Couldn’t they give us a single break?”
Pete sits down, paler than pale, on the grubby couch. “I think they meant to make it as hard as possible.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
He scratches his head, and I wince when I see he’s scrubbed off a bit of fresh scab. “The people who have done this. They’ve disabled all the usual ways of escape, made it virtually impossible to contact the outside world.”
“Eh?” Smitty leans against the desk. “Who’s they?”
Pete shrugs. “The government. The military. The New World Order. Whoever orchestrated this and is using us like rats in a lab.”
I stare at him, openmouthed. When he doesn’t elaborate, I look at Smitty, but he’s wearing the same expression as me. I turn back to Pete. “Are you kidding me? You think that this is all on purpose? What’s happened, with everyone . . . getting ill?”
“You mean everyone dying and coming back to life,” Smitty corrects me.
“OK, so we’re going to talk about this now?” I realize I’m still holding my ski pole, and fling it to the ground. “We don’t know it’s true that they died. For all we know, this is some whacked-out Scottish Flu.” I’m saying it, but I’m not entirely buying it.
“Yeah, or rabies.” Smitty drips sarcasm. “Or they were off their trolleys on shrooms or speed.”
“Face facts!” Pete shouts. “We saw what happened with that driver. He got infected, he died, he came back to life. Just like the others.”
“We don’t know that for sure —”
“We do.” He cuts me short. “Anyway, whatever you choose to believe, you can’t deny that we’re captive here. And the powers-that-be are watching every move we make, waiting to see what we do next.”
Smitty smiles at me. “The Great White Dope cracked his skull. We have to remember that.” He turns to Pete. “Watching us?”
Pete nods. “Don’t look now, but there’s a closed-circuit TV camera on the wall behind you.”
Smitty and I struggle with the urge to turn around.
Pete reads us and smiles. “In the café, too. And the shop. I
checked. No microphones, so I think it’s pictures only, not sound. Of course, I haven’t had time to do an adequate sweep, but clearly we could look all day and not find a bug if they didn’t want it found —”
“This is crazy!” It’s my turn to butt in. “Of course there are cameras; they’re everywhere these days! But it doesn’t mean that they’ve all been planted to spy on us in the event of a zombie apocalypse!”
That gets their attention. “OK, I said it.” I flop on the couch, exhausted. “I said the word. Is everyone satisfied now?”
“Ha!” Pete says. “So you’ll accept that we’re dealing with zombies, but you find the idea that we’re being watched too incredible to consider?”
Smitty shakes his head and laughs. “You are ridonkulous, Frosty. Like anyone would be interested in watching us.”
Alice runs into the room, her face flushed. “There’s something très bizarre going on outside!”
Smitty raises an eyebrow. “Have you been drinking corn syrup again, Malice?” He pushes past her, out of the room. “You’re seeing things.”
“The bus door, you idiot!” Alice shouts after him. “Somebody’s barricaded it!”
“We did that,” I explain. “We thought . . .” Something stops me from telling her the whole truth. “We decided it would be better if we wedged the door shut. Just in case it blows open in the wind.”
“Yuh-huh?” Alice’s eyebrows are practically in her hairline. “Sure you’re not keeping one of those things in there as a pet?”
“I’m sure,” I say. “After all, we’ve already got Smitty.”
“Heard that.” A voice comes from outside of the room somewhere.
Undead (9780545473460) Page 8
