by Ian Woodhead
The man cried out. He wrestled his arm out of Kenny’s grip, spun around, and ran back the way he came.
Kenny bent down and picked up the knife, turning it around in his hands. Just like the man, this blade stunk of whatever foul stuff they used to coat their bodies with. He wrinkled his nose, wishing that his sense of smell wasn’t so acute now. Could this be some sort of camouflage?
He’d heard of other people trying to do the same in his world, covering their bodies in rotting flesh in the hope that the shambling dead would think that they were like them. As far as he knew, the idea had not worked. The dead always knew who was dead and who wasn’t. Kenny remembered that time in the alley, just before his sister had returned. He had actually felt the thoughts of the reanimated. He lifted the knife up and held it against the light.
Perhaps these guys had figured out another way to avoid the dead things. Instead of trying to blend in, what if they had discovered an odor that deterred them instead. Kenny chuckled. Wouldn’t that be a kicker if these guys had found a formula for a zombie repellent? Maybe that wasn’t all that these guys had worked out. How had they managed to stay human without taking the tablets or having shots? He was pretty sure that he’d have noticed them lining up outside a medi-center. At least, his nose would have.
Kenny set off after the guy, intending to find out. He pushed aside the nagging doubt that perhaps he wasn’t really cured, that somehow the virus in the zombie’s blood had reacted to whatever chemicals that Rossini had pumped into him and given him an unexpected high.
“Will you stop it, Kenny,” he muttered. No matter how much he tried to flush away the uncertainty, the doubt refused to leave. It only increased when he found himself beginning to tire. “Come on, Kenny, admit it, you’re just lying to yourself.” He leaned against the wall and took a deep breath, wondering what the chances were of bumping into his alternate sister. It must be astronomical. “Oh shit, this really must be a television studio and he’s just killed his own sister. The fuckers must have turned her as soon as he was out of sight.”
“Fuck you all!” he screamed, gripping the knife tight. “I refuse to play your game.” He saw his reflection in the tip of the blade. No more messing about, no more doubt. Kenny would kill them all if he had to. He stormed down the hallway, just praying for one of the bastards to show their face. They were going to tell him what was happening here, even if he had to cut the information out of them.
He slowed down at the sight of another door set into the featureless grey wall. Was anyone in there? He stopped outside the door and pressed his ear against the wood. He heard nothing. Kenny opened it carefully, sniffing as the smell of old paper rushed out.
It didn’t feel like anyone was inside. Even so, Kenny wasn’t going to take any chances. He needed to find those people. He growled softly, hoping that at least one of them would be in here. Kenny pushed open the door and entered, gazing at the dusty metal shelves bolted to the wall. At first, he thought that he’d come full circle. This storeroom was identical to the one they’d emerged into. He reached out and picked up a sheet of paper from the shelf next to him. Kenny stiffened and spun around; he saw that he wasn’t alone, but it wasn’t one of the survivors. The individual lurching out of the gloom had been dead for a long time, judging by its appearance.
The dried-up corpse took three painful steps towards him. Kenny waited for it to move again, to let it get closer for him before putting the thing out of its misery. The zombie didn’t continue its progress. Instead the thing turned around and shuffled back the way it had come. He looked down at the blade, feeling as though he’d just been cheated out of his kill. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.
It paused but then continued to shamble away. This made no sense at all. Why had it not gone for him? Could it have been the knife? Was the taint clinging to the blade enough to make it turn back? There was one way of finding out. He placed the knife on the shelf next to his head and walked over to the corpse. “Come on then, you fucker,” he snarled. “Show me what you’re made of.” It didn’t react. Instead, the creature disappeared back into the shadows, shambling through a gap between the shelving on the other side of the storeroom. Kenny reached for the knife and followed it, noticing that the room was a lot larger than he’d thought. There were another two rows of shelving in here, all full of bundled-up papers.
The door behind him moved an inch. He ran forward and peered out into the hallway, catching sight of the others running past the room, all armed with weapons ranging from garden tools to shotguns. He looked at his knife and knew he wouldn’t last long in a pitched battle with that lot. Kenny jumped back when he saw two of them stop.
“That door should be closed,” one of them said. Kenny followed the dead thing further into the room. At least he would be able to handle that. He listened as they passed over the threshold. He didn’t think they could see him, unless their eyesight was better suited to dim conditions. Kenny gripped the knife tighter, swearing silently when he heard them move towards the gap in the bookcase.
He almost yelled out as the desiccated face of the dead thing appeared right in front of him. Kenny jumped to the side and watched in utter confusion as it headed towards the two men. They saw it at the same time and both fired. The explosion of both weapons in the small room almost blew out Kenny’s eardrums. He watched their mouths open and close before running back into the hallway.
Kenny stepped over the now headless corpse and waited for the ringing in his head to lessen before looking out of the open door. They had disappeared, and so had much of his anger.
“Yet, I’m still not dead,” he muttered, stepping out into the corridor. No matter what explanations his tired brain came up with, he couldn’t escape the simple fact that, by now, he should have turned into a shambling corpse. No bitten victim had survived longer than a few minutes after one of those things had sunk its teeth into them.
He needed to find out where they had taken Diane. Nothing else mattered. Kenny should just accept the simple fact that he hadn’t turned into one of those things and drop it. After he found his sister, then he could work it out. Fuck it, he’d just ask Diane, she’d know what to do.
Kenny could hear the sound of their receding feet. It was tempting to follow them, just to see what they thought of his condition. Fuck knows what the blond man must have told them. He turned and silently made his way the opposite direction instead. His sister’s safety took priority.
The walls on both sides spread out until he found himself standing in what resembled a large hall. Hundreds of candles were fastened to the walls, their yellow glow giving the rough plaster a dull golden cast. Kenny started when a shadow under one of the candles groaned. Kenny stared into the gloom; he was no longer alone. Unlike those clowns he’d avoided, these slumped individuals weren’t at all concerned that a stranger was now in their midst. His eyes moved from one heaped mound of bundled and tattered rags to the next. Were they sleeping?
Kenny approached the first slumped body, hoping that he hadn’t made a mistake here. What if they weren’t alive and he’d just stumbled into a room full of resting dead things? He looked behind him, checking to see if he hadn’t passed any more doors on his way in here. There was nothing but two unbroken lines of grey wall, so those others must have come from here. Kenny slowed down and leaned a couple of inches forwards, trying to see any signs of life beneath those folds of filthy brown rags. A single bright blue eye stared back at him.
“Do I know you?”
He guessed that the girl wrapped inside those rags couldn’t have been much older than sixteen, yet her voice didn’t sound right. The tone was all wrong, as if spoken by an old woman, or somebody zoned out. “Do you know when the others will be back?” he asked, keeping his voice steady. The girl stared back at him. After a moment, he decided that her word quota must have been used up by asking her first question. Perhaps he’d have better luck from the next pile of clothing.
“What about you, buddy?” he
asked, looked down at a man that, Kenny guessed, was a few years older than him. “Can you help me out, or would you prefer me to kick the shit out of you instead? Believe me, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
The man’s eyes flickered. He looked up at Kenny and giggled. “Those bastards must have spiked my recovery vial. You can’t really here, Kenny,” he replied. “We both know that you died years ago, in the first purge.” The man shivered. “Get out of here, leave my mind.”
Kenny’s stomach lurched when he realized that this man was Nathan Riley, the data operator who’d occupied the cubicle next to him. It wasn’t Nathan, just as the zombie that took a bite out of his leg wasn’t really his sister. This really was a complete mind fuck. “Where did they take the girl?”
The man closed his eyes. “Get out of my head!” he screamed.
Kenny spun around and looked for a way out; his eyes settled on a large closed doorway on the other side of the hall. He ran to it and barged through the doors.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Kenny stopped dead. He saw two men dressed in dark blue overalls, both glaring at him, and both holding an arm of his sister, Diane.
“I’ll ask you one more time, you little bastard …”
Kenny didn’t give the man who barked out the question the chance to finish his sentence. He charged forward, sweeping the blade in a low arc. The knife cut through the man’s overall. Kenny shouted in triumph as the man fell back, clutching his stomach. The other man dropped the bludgeon he held in his other hand before running through the open doors.
Diane turned. “Oh my God!” she sobbed. “I thought I’d never see you again.” She spun around and launched a kick at the man on the floor. “You utter bastard!” she screamed. Then she turned back to Kenny and fell into his open arms. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you, Kenny.”
He held her tight, enjoying her warmth. He had a pretty good idea what those two clowns were about to do to Diane. “I’m just glad I got here in time.” Her shiver travelled through his arms.
“So am I,” she replied. Diane looked into his eyes. “But, this makes no sense. How come you’re not …”
“Why am I not dead? I have no idea.” He gently pushed her back and pointed at his leg. “I should be dead, Diane, considering I was bitten by a dead thing shortly after those bastards took you away.” He decided not to mention that it had been her duplicate that had done the deed. Somehow, he didn’t think that would go down too well.
The blood drained from her face. She staggered back. “Oh fuck! No, no way.”
He sighed. “Diane, it’s okay, really it is, I haven’t felt this great for ages.” He smiled. “I’m fine, really I am.”
She took one step towards him. “When, when did you say this happened?”
Kenny shrugged, watching the man on the floor lift his head. Judging from his expression, he expected Kenny to start craving raw human flesh as well. “Like I said, about twenty minutes ago.”
She crouched down and lifted his trouser leg. “This really is a day for the impossible.” Diane looked up. “And you feel okay?”
“Best I’ve felt for a long time. I’d forgotten what normal felt like, Diane.” He pulled her onto her feet. “Maybe it’s time to leave now?”
“Wait, Kenny.” She pointed over at another door in the corner of the room.
He hadn’t even noticed it. Unlike the rest of the doors, this one had three thick bars set into the thick wood. Another face stared out from behind the bars.
“They’ll be back, you know,” Diane whispered.
He nodded, keeping his eyes on the other man. “I know you.” Kenny sighed, like that meant anything now, considering how their little trip had blown away his sense of reality.
“I’m Tony,” the guy replied. “Can you get me out of here please?”
Diane pushed past Kenny and pulled back the heavy bolt. “Kenny, we really do need to move.” She looked at the door. “Those two were only supposed to lock me in here, but apparently they read more into that command.”
Tony stood directly in front of Kenny and looked him up and down. “Is it all true, I mean did you really survive a bite?” He grinned. “This must be providence.”
“Yeah, that’s so nice to hear,” hissed Diane. “How the hell do we get out of here?”
Kenny turned to see the two men framed in the open doorway, smiling. Behind them, he saw five rifles and two pistols pointed at their heads. Although he’d somehow survived a zombie bite, Kenny doubted that his body would survive half a dozen blasts. “Can we talk about this?”
“Tell me how you’re still living?” asked the blonde man.
Kenny felt Tony push something into the palm of his hand.
“Swallow these, Kenny,” whispered Tony. “This day of miracles isn’t over just yet.”
Kenny looked at the two tablets rolling about in the palm of his hands and resisted the urge to question the man. He saw the crowd part and saw another Tony push past them. Kenny threw the tablets down his throat, seeing his sister and Tony do the same. The room around them screamed into a medley of multi-colored water.
Chapter Twelve
Stephen Haney gripped his forefinger, grinning when the bones cracked.
“Do you have to do that?” hissed his wife. “You know how much that annoys me.” She shook her head, biting her bottom lip. “We won’t get them if you’re not quiet.”
He stared back at her, waiting for her to turn away. He wasn’t going to let the old bag beat him in another staring contest. Stephen gripped his index finger and pulled; it didn’t crack but the woman still glared. “You’re the one who’s talking,” he whispered.
“You’re pathetic,” she snapped, spinning around.
He didn’t bother biting. What was the point? He’d won this bout. As for being pathetic, Stephen believed that they both looked like complete idiots, dressed in these bright yellow jumpsuits. He resembled a banana while his wife looked more like a lemon. He resisted the urge to chuckle. The analogy suited her, the sour-faced old bitch. How the hell she’d managed to pour her fat ass into the costume was beyond him. He could only assume that the material must be super stretchy. He doubted that it would be of much use after she’d finished with it, except maybe for use as a car cover.
“What are you giggling at?”
“Nothing,” he replied, instinctively inching away from her fat arms. If she got too pissed, Natalie could easily knock him into next week with her deadly swipes. “Can you see the others yet?” he said, hoping that the change of subject would stop her from digging any further.
She leaned further out from the pretend rock outcropping; it took a tremendous amount of self-control not to chuckle when she almost toppled over. Just the thought of her spinning around and bashing him with the studded club gripped in her other hand was enough to keep his big mouth shut. His wife was obviously having the time of her life in here. Not that it showed. Natalie had gotten her outward dark glower down to a fine art; only he could tell how the woman truly felt. That came with being married to her for over twenty years. He silently sighed, wondering where the time had gone. It only seemed like a week since one of the most powerful women in the city took an instant shine to the shy office boy, working away in some forgotten area of the government records office.
Stephen’s boss frightened the crap out of everybody, with good reason. Natalie’s family had connections right to the very top of the government. On his first day of employment, his supervisor and his new friend Edverd Rossini had taken pains to educate him on the proper etiquette whenever the woman paid a visit down to the records office. Rossini had mentioned, in passing, that it hardly ever happened though; she didn’t care what happened down in the bowels of the building, and had only come down there twice in the two years he’d been working there.
It took the entire workforce of thirty by utter surprise when the feared woman plus her gaggle of executives entered the records office a few hours later. St
ephen remembered how the tall, dark-haired woman just stood there, like a tall marble statue, pinning the workers down with her huge brown eyes. Thankfully, he was standing behind Rossini when she’d appeared, so Stephen believed that she wouldn’t notice him. Blending into the background had always been his speciality. Being unnoticed gave him the advantage of observing how other people reacted; his other talent was the ability to usually guess what other people were thinking. He had little problem in seeing how everybody was terrified of this beautiful woman and how she patently played up to the image of the hard-faced boss. Behind that steely exterior, Stephen saw something else, a softer side. He had sighed, wondering why he was trying to get beneath her image. It wasn’t as if she’d be back down here anytime soon.
Like a bird of prey detecting a mouse scurrying through a field, Natalie Devonshire’s head had jerked away from his supervisor’s terrified face, her hard eyes gazing past Rossini and settling on Stephen. She then did something that obviously shocked everyone else in the room. Natalie smiled at the new boy. Stephen’s instincts told him immediately that the woman was flirting. He took a risk and smiled back at her, watching the woman walk towards him, parting the assembled workers like Moses parting the Red Sea.
From the body language screaming from every one of his fellow workers, Stephen had obviously broken some kind of cardinal rule about not mixing with the ones who ruled the floors above. He guessed that he should have just dropped his eyes to the floor and waited for her to scrutinize another poor worker. Stephen kept his gaze on her eyes, trying his best not to let his eyes wander down to the woman’s large breasts. This was so stupid, he was actually fantasizing about screwing her. Well maybe not that dumb, Natalie Devonshire was a deeply attractive woman, Certainly not a wafer-thin girl like his girlfriend. This woman towered over Stephen by at least a good foot and probably outweighed him by a few pounds as well.
He felt his heat deflate when she abruptly turned around and walked back towards the outer door with her followers trailing after her. He felt the whole room breathe a collective sigh of relief before they all turned to glare at the apprentice who had dared to look their main boss in the eye without showing a trace of fear. Stephen had taken all the remarks and put downs for the rest of the day with a pinch of salt, not really caring what the others thought. The only one who had treated him with an ounce of respect had been Rossini, who had advised him to be careful and to try to fit in with the rest of the crowd. He’d taken him to one side and carefully explained that he fully intended to rise to the top of the game, and that he would accomplish this with knowledge. He stood behind Stephen, grabbed his shoulders and slowly turned him around, explaining that every sordid detail of all the top players in the city were kept here. You just needed to know where to look. Rossini had then winked at him before hurrying off to join the others.
