Dead End Job (Book One of the 'Zombino' series)

by Chris Welsh

  Chapter Fifteen. 03:15pm

  RUN! COWER! CRY!

  The garden's visual effect suffered with proximity. It looked quaint from afar but dirty up close. I'd always avoided it, labelling it the realm of the smoker. Thousands of discarded cigarette stumps mixed with the gravel rocks on an almost 1:1 ratio, giving the floor a spongy, soggy feel underfoot. The fountain was also decidedly worse for wear, the stonework all chipped and stained by people resting against the edge, placing cups and cans on the flat bit and tipping ash into the water.

  The stream that usually flowed from the statue boy's 'rocket' was off, stagnating the pool, the surface broken only by the odd plastic bottle or empty crisp packet. It was a murky brown and laced with long, slimy weeds. An unpleasant damp scent hung around the fountain, mixing with the lingering stench of smoke.

  On the rim of the stone I spotted a small circular indent, the same width and diameter of a pint glass and an inch deep. Scratch marks etched the lip as if something had been forcibly removed. The sunken hole had apparently been utilised as an ashtray. It piqued my interest until Susan restarted her interrogation of Nelson, shouting something about his sweater-vest.

  "See! Look, right there. In the bushes. That's where you landed. And there's a big chunk of your stupid green jumper thing stuck on a twig."

  "That's well and good," he retorted, more snot than a flu epidemic, "but I'm wearing my 'stupid green jumper thing' and it's perfectly intact. Washed and dried last night, and pressed this morning by my own mother. It's fucking pristine."

  Susan furrowed her brow and chewed her lip, lining things up in her head. She waved an accusatory finger from the mess-strewn bushes to the intact human a number of times without forming any words. Nelson rubbed a bunch of facts in her face, lathering it up good.

  "Also, if you look beyond the piece of torn cloth, you'll notice gallons of blood and bits of person. Splashed up on the wall, right there, see? Okay, so ask yourself, do I look like a man who plunged off a building and exploded into a million pieces?"

  He did a thing with his arms, as if he was scanning his own body with invisible metal detectors. So unashamedly sarcastic I thought Susan would whip off a shoe and go to town on his head.

  "It doesn't worry you that we, all three of us, saw you go off the roof of the building? You, or at least someone who looks uncannily like you, died in a horrific way. We know because we made them die. Even with ninety percent of the building's workforce now turned into flesh-craving, rotting attack-dogs, and nothing making any sense, that's still pretty messed up."

  "Of course it worries me! It's more than 'messed up'! You should see inside my head, it's a Carnival of Concern. But whatever you saw, it wasn't me; I'm not dead. I've never been up on the roof. Not once in my entire life. If the poor fool you murdered happened to look like me then, well, that's their bloody business. Not mine. You killed someone else, you murderers."

  The urge to mutter 'Unfortunately' struck me. I kept my mouth shut and allowed my emotions to duel silently; the slight relief that I hadn't been party to killing someone I personally knew and the microscopically larger relief that I hadn't missed my chance to destroy Nelson.

  Susan seethed with distrust, confounded at her inability to prove we'd thrown him off a roof. Its a hard sell, convincing a demonstrably healthy man that he was actually in bits two yards away. She took a deep breath, ready to launch round two, when the shrill cry of the main building's fire alarm kicked into life. It was a whiny, beguiling noise that flared my claustrophobia, trapping me inside my own head.

  I recognised it well from the monthly drills. Repetitive exercises to ensure staff didn't forget to run outside in case of fire. Forced into single-file, we'd be corralled out by a designated fire-safety warden in an orange fluorescent jacket, one for each section - mine was Nelson – then hang around until our heads had been counted and every name ticked off a register.

  Presumably the location made fire safety a true concern but Nelson always took it one or two hundred steps too far. He'd transform into an army drill sergeant in his bright uniform, bellowing in the face of every employee to ensure their calm civility as they exited the hypothetically-burning building. When we were all outside he would refuse to count until we had formed a perfectly straight line.

  We were consistently the last section to re-enter the building. Stepping forward a few inches when his back turned netted an extra five minutes outside. If the day was sunny we stayed out for hours. People brought snacks or a book, treated it like a strangely regimented picnic.

  -

  We saw no smoke.

  "Might be a survivor, signalling," Stuart called as we ran back through the garden to the foyer.

  "Could be a zombie slamming their face into an alarm button," I reminded him. Nelson and Susan hung back. She struggled to run on gravel without removing her heels and Nelson was still adamantly explaining how he wasn't dead.

  We reached the glass doors and pressed our faces up against them, straining to catch a glimpse of any smoke or flames.

  We saw something else.

  "What the shit is that?" Stuart said, the words dribbling slowly past his teeth. Our eyes drew to the far end of the foyer.

  "If it's another Nelson I'm just going to smash some glass and cut him into mince, okay?" I said.

  "I don't think it's another Nelson..."

  Something like a train hurtled through the crowd, tossing zombies aside with ease. A bunch left the floor altogether, flapping their limbs awkwardly before gravity got them; others shot aside like bowling pins. I couldn't tell from any angle what caused the fuss, but whatever it was, it was fast and strong and headed right for us.

  "Oh my," said Stuart, catching a glimpse of the thing a blink before I did.

  The inner doors shattered into a thousand segments as the culprit smashed through and slid to a halt in the carpeted section. The ear-piercing alarm was still going strong.

  The creature unfurled from its crouched, battering-ram position and posed on the other side of the final set of doors.

  A humanoid, vaguely, with a human head and human musculature but arms as big as tree trunks and two foot taller than any man I'd ever seen working in the building. It would tower even over Tall Weird Abdul, the guy who sat a three desks away from me, collected Beanie Babies and exclusively ate those foamy sweets that look like fried eggs.

  The thing perched on legs like sticks, thin and long, with a destroyed set of office clothes struggling to cover its engorged upper body. The sleeves had burst, exploded, leaving strips of fabric that brushed against the vein-laden skin, pulled taut by extreme muscles.

  Steam billowed from its angry, flared nostrils and rose until it disappeared. The word 'bull' leapt into my head, where a voice I didn't recognise screamed it at me over and over. Bullish, it was. Very bullish. Only without the horns and punk-rock nose ring. It had the palpable, vibrating anger of a rearing bull glaring at a cocky matador. Then I realised my clothes were daubed mostly in red, the blood of the fallen. I felt its rage, but it was a non-committal rage, a wild rage with no set target.

  Contradicting the other brands of zombie we had encountered, the eyes of this Goliath glowed a haunting maroon and knew exactly how to focus. It gazed out from the dimness and punctured through me like a laser, frying whatever scraps of soul I had left. An ethereal part of me melted and slipped away down a metaphysical drain, making me tired and a little woozy. Light-headed in the face of a monster. I suddenly knew why people in horror films froze up and screamed on the spot, sometimes for ridiculous amounts of time, instead of just running the hell away.

  The blood face I drew on the glass during our first visit to the doors lined up with the centre of its pumping chest like a smiling badge of honour.

  My knees locked and my spine turned to iron. Only Stuart's frantic dragging and screaming that pulled me back into the real world, speeding back across the floor with no real goal or direction. Another explosive smash of glass overtook the shrill alarm in
the competition to raise our heartbeats highest.

  Our two companions had wandered away from the garden, mostly out of curiosity until they spotted us charging from the building. They stood in front of an outbuilding, a solid metal square built with corrugated iron sheets and a sloped roof. Nelson had already begun to fiddle with the door; he hammered on a small keypad with a chubby finger, causing a beep followed by a soft hiss as we arrived.

  The door opened and we all stuffed inside. I grabbed the handle and closed it over, leaving a two inch gap to peer through. It was heavy as hell and sturdy, five or six inches thick. I wondered briefly what it was made of until the huge, charging creature distracted me. It swung its giant arms like a swimmer doing butterfly stroke, leaning forward, sticking close to the ground. In a constant state of falling rather than running, as if the thing's oddly weedy legs provided no support and crashing was the inevitable outcome. The whole building shook from its thunderous footsteps.

  I slammed the door shut and a mechanical lock clunked into place.

  The fire alarm became almost inaudible, a testament to the thickness of our protective metal cocoon. At least, I hoped it was protective – based on the beast's trajectory it would collide soon and collide hard.

  "What is that thing?!" Susan whispered, as if it might hear us and charge harder if she spoke loudly.

  I managed to say "I don't," before flying across the room. Apparently leaning against the door to strengthen it was a terrible idea. It didn't open, the lock stayed strong, but when the creature slammed into the building, the force of impact bounced me across the open room at great speed. The featureless wall opposite ended my flight with a stubborn unwillingness to not cause me immense pain.

  Inside the building it sounded like the end of the world, as the crunch and twang of dented metal reverberated and battered our eardrums. Susan dropped to the floor with her palms fused to the side of her head; Nelson crouched with a grimace on his face like his teeth were being drilled and the dentist forgot the anaesthetic. I lifted my head and wished away my consciousness whilst the thing outside roared and thumped the ground a few times, then stalked off.

  A minute of absolute silence ticked by before any of us dared speak.

  Stuart went first.

  "What?! What was...what the shitting hell?!" he said, echoing Susan's earlier sentiments and eliciting only shrugs from those of us not lying in a ball of agony on the floor. My leg felt like it'd popped out of the socket and spun 360 degrees before punching back in. Stuart pulled me up and I hobbled in circles, hopped up and down and experimentally put weight on my injured limb, until it approached 'normal' again. I decided I didn't want to ever slam into a wall then land on hard concrete again. That shit was for chumps.

  The more I stretched the better it got, until soon I could walk a few yards without reducing to tears. Then I sat down again and rubbed my hip, making a face like a chastised puppy.

  "Whatever it is, I think it's buggered off," Nelson said. He pried the door open without any of our consent. I would have stopped him if I wasn't temporarily suffering severe leg disablement. "Only thing I see is the zombies leaving the foyer. There's none near here but some in the garden. They're spreading out a bit."

  "How many?" I asked between winces. He started counting with his fingers, mouthing a number for each one. Susan took it upon herself to confirm, peering past Nelson's irritating, splotchy face.

  "There's fucking loads," she said. "Swarms."

  Brilliant.

  -

  I expected the container to house landscaping equipment or gardening stuff, maybe an extra office, but there was none of that. We were currently in a small waiting room with a handful of chairs stacked up in the corner. A pile of ancient magazines lay on a shin-high table shaped like a kidney, itself out of fashion by at least three decades. A wire hung down from the ceiling with a dull, dusty bulb on the end of it; no light shade.

  A motivational poster tacked to the wall, worn at the edges and with an irreparable crease running down the centre, showed a whale's tail breaking out of the ocean swell with the words 'Never Give Up' printed underneath it. Plain white font on a black background, framing the image; stiff, formal and uninspiring. It carried no indication if the advice aimed at whales only or if it applied to people too.

  Aside from the entrance and the poster, the only other thing breaking the monotonous, gloomy walls were elevator doors with a polished wooden veneer. A single pulsing, orange button indented the wall next to it.

  "Nelson, how did you get the door open?" Susan asked, done examining the poky room. "There was a code and you knew it. How? What's in here?"

  "I didn't know it, not exactly. It was a guess. My mum works here sometimes, well most of the time. She told me once that it was 'her' building. I guessed my birth year, and it opened. Just luck."

  "Your MOTHER works in here? What's here?"

  "No idea. She's never said what she does, only that she's in charge of whatever it is and therefore exceptionally important. She says that often."

  "I thought she was a fucking team leader on the second floor!"

  "Third. She is. But she works here too. Usually at night or over weekends. She hardly ever comes home; she's either in the office or in here. Gets a bit lonely somet..."

  "Ha, you live with your mother!" I said. "Not even I live with my mum."

  I instantly regretted my own implication.

  "Yes. I do. It's a lovely arrangement and I enjoy it very much. I don't appreciate your tone," he said.

  "I don't appreciate YOUR tone," I said. Not quite the zinger it was in my head.

  We had a brief conversation about what to do next and Nelson belligerently campaigned to travel further into the outbuilding. He maintained that his mother would provide help and shelter, though I wasn't so sure. I considered her a rough and hateful creation living on a continuous power trip but, considering the other option was to head out amid the zombie swarms, Susan and Stuart didn't need much convincing. We were also piss-scared of the undead freight train beast.

  Nelson prodded the illuminated elevator button, leaving a grubby oval of oil and grease.

  "Where's your watch?" I asked him, noticing his bare wrist.

  "What watch? I don't wear one. I get rashes underneath them."

  "Ew. Right. I ask because the version of you on the roof had a gold one, tacky as fuck. Ever owned a gold watch?"

  "No, never. See, I told you that wasn't me!"

  The doors opened up and bathed us with light from a pair of powerful strip lights on the ceiling. Disgusting musak, bass-free drum loops and polyphonic bleating blared from a tinny speaker stuck in the corner like a metal spider. I recognised it as a riff on a popular song but couldn't place which one; the actual notes had been re-appropriated into a one-dimensional dirge. It was so purposefully inoffensive that it wasn't possible to hear it and not wish to take a swing at whatever bastard created it. Abrasive, I'd call it, like someone stuffing sandpaper into my ears.

  But that wasn't the worst thing about the lift.

  The worst thing was when Nelson said;

  "Doors Closing. Going Down."

  Except it wasn't Nelson.

  We exchanged horrified glances.

  I burst out laughing.

  "Your mother has a recording of you as the voice of the lift. That's...brilliant."

  "It isn't me!" he said, vehemently denying any involvement. "That was just a normal voice!"

  "You don't have a normal voice, Nelson. It was you, without a doubt. Same nasally whine."

  Susan and Stuart nodded along. Nelson blushed a hot shade of crimson. "I don't know where she got it, then. It's a nice lift though, isn't it?" he said.

  Everything except the voice.

  Each surface was brushed silver except the floor, covered by a soft and luscious white carpet. I almost felt bad for trampling on it, rubbing blood and dirt and god-knows-what into the fibres.

  "Where does this thing go?" Susan asked. "Feels like we'r
e going down some distance. Fast, too."

  We were. The control panel had only one button, labelled 'B'. My internal altimeter suggested we delved deep into the Earth.

  "You have no idea what your mother does down here?" she asked Nelson. He shook his whole body, as if to say he absolutely didn't. He knew so little that a simple shake of the head wasn't enough; he had to get his shoulders involved and compliment the whole thing with hip-wiggling waist action.

  Susan managed to say "I wonder if," in a suspicious voice before the Nelson voice spoke up again and I ruined her flow by laughing my fool head off.

  "You have reached your destination. Have a splendid day!" imposter-Nelson said.

  "I have never said those words in that order! It can't be me!" he said, ranting. "It can't!"

  I gave him a light shove through the opening doors and we stepped into a cramped corridor barely wider than the doors of the lift. "Doors closing," we heard, setting my guffaws off again.

  It's good to laugh.

  "It's not me," Nelson said.

  -

  "Where are we?" Stuart said, expressing mild wonder. "I didn't think for a second that Tall Trees was the type of place to have a secret underground base."

  "It isn't. Maybe that's the point," said Susan. She walked to the only thing of note in the corridor; a door near the end. Nelson joined her and pushed in to glimpse through the rectangular window.

  "Another corridor," he said. "This one is bright though, loads of lights. Looks weird."

  Two fist-sized buttons embedded into the wall, a red one on top and green one underneath. After searching the door for a handle and finding nothing, Nelson thumped the red button and stepped back as the door slid sideways with a futuristic 'whoosh'.

  Another identical door stood four yards away. The width of the corridor left enough room for us to walk along in single file.

  "You go first, Nelson. I don't trust that other door. Go test it."

  "Not a bloody chance!" he said, as if I was asking him to jump into a tiger pit. Which I was, except the tigers may or may not have existed. "You go!"

  "I'll go, you pansies," said Stuart, yet again climbing higher than me in my imaginary ranking of manliness.

  "Wait!" I said, following him in like an obedient pet, leaving Susan and Nelson standing together at the threshold.

  We reached half way and the doors slid shut. Every white, angelic light in the room turned a hellish shade of red. The ominous change in colour set off riots in my brain; every conscious part of me alerted to the looming, suggested danger. Somewhere a hidden speaker let out an unwanted, droning 'Wooooop', a warning siren.

  "Oh fu" Stuart managed, before the jets of water attacked. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, fired from pinholes in the walls. Powerful streams of water hit me absolutely everywhere. The bare parts of my skin, hands and face stung from the barrage. Not a single millimetre of me remained dry or safe from the obtrusive jets. Stuart suffered the same, covering his head with his arms, beaten into submission by the overwhelming spray. The nightmarish, grudge-holding, anti-human car wash trapped us together but attacked us quite separately.

  I fought my way back to the closed door; no mean feat with eyes clamped tightly shut for fear of bursting an eyeball. I became convinced I would die in that tacky red light, that the shower was acid or something else that'd erode my skin and melt me down to a featureless pile of misc remains. I intended to reach the window to give Susan and Nelson a clear view of my slow death because I'm such a good friend like that.

  The water collected on the floor, reaching my ankles within seconds. Brief thoughts of drowning crossed my mind as I sloshed ing the growing tide, pawing at the walls, searching with my hands.

  Then it ceased.

  The lights switched back from red to fluorescent white. Drips echoed through the room, accompanying Stuart's rapid, shallow breathing. The brightness broke through my eyelids, glowing white, the kind of light in futuristic sci-fi that highlights every shiny, immaculate surface. Except it was in a strange basement hidden in the middle of nowhere, not a lab in outer space.

  A noxious, chemical stench of disinfectant, part of the watery mix that blasted us, stung my nose and itched the back of my throat. A nervous silence owned the room, except for Stuart's spitting and the dripping from our sodden clothes. I tried talking but the itch made it difficult and only a choking cough emerged.

  A distant, creeping noise grew and overtook everything else, like the engine of a truck building up without changing gear.

  Then came wind.

  Not strong enough to take my feet but packing enough punch to send Stuart reeling. His troublesome tie repeatedly slapped him in the face.

  The motors rose to a cacophony; it sounded like a thousand switched-on vacuum cleaners. The blasts of air boxed my head into new, painful shapes. Like the water, the wind came from everywhere, beating my body without preference. It attacked the whole of me, surrounding me, swaddling me in warm, ferocious air. Stuart steadied himself, squatting low with outstretched arms, but tumbled as the wind changed direction. It slammed me into the opposite wall. I hadn't realised it was coming at us in any specific direction until it changed.

  Maybe thirty seconds later – which felt like an hour, the way time slows to highlight misery - it gusted us along the corridor more forcibly than either of us could handle. The three-inches of water turned into a wave pool, splashing this way and that at the whim of the artificial wind.

  It ceased, and we washed up in a heap near the exit. One of Stuart's knees dug mercilessly into my spine. He lay face down, making bubbles, until he whipped his head up and gulped in air.

  There was a ding, like a microwave.

  We were done.

  "Light Infection Wash Completed," said the eerie rendition of Nelson, speaking from everywhere thanks to hidden speakers. Rows of thin vents flipped open and sucked all water away. Then they snapped shut again, becoming flush with the walls.

  The room looked as before; pristine and shining, straight out of a catalogue. No sign of the recent Tsunami & Hurricane Convention remained. The only differences were the gibbering wrecks wobbling to their feet. i.e. - Us.

  The smell of disinfectant competed with the warm scent of an industrial clothes dryer but still cloyed. The caustic stench of cleaning products tore at my respiratory system like it was trying to strip it down and sell the parts. Immense relief hit when both doors slid open and allowed in lungfuls of fresher air.

  Stuart climbed to his feet but immediately doubled over, clutching his stomach and retching up a bucket's worth of pale gunk. Water mixed with bile and phlegm. He followed it with a flurry of painful coughs, and spat a wad of thick, brown mucus into the corner of the room, holding up a hand as an apology. Susan rushed past my sopping wet shoulder to Stuart's aide, slamming a palm against his back several times. She held the misguided view that it might help him recover in some way.

  He pushed her off and started to speak, still struggling but determined to get his words out.

  He appeared furious about something.

  "Why...did you press...the fucking...red...button? Why would you ever...press...a fucking...RED BUTTON?"

  "I didn't know it would do a bad thing!" Nelson said. He made a vapid attempt at apologetic eyes, but his whining voice only redoubled Stuart's hate. Even when he was genuinely saying sorry he was a magnet for displeasure. It was sort of heart-breaking.

  Stuart exploded.

  "DON'T FUCKING PRESS A RED FUCKING BUTTON WHEN THERE IS A GREEN FUCKING BUTTON RIGHT FUCKING THERE," he yelled, before descending back into loud hacking, as if he'd put the fit on hold whilst he vented and caused a back log.

  "I'm sorry," Nelson said. "I didn't mean to get both of you wet and blown all over the place."

  I fired him a knowing glance but it returned blank. I gave up and examined myself, wondering how best to stop the water in my clothes from turning me into a walking, chafing icicle.

  Most of the blood and coagulated cr
ust had washed clean away, leaving just light stains on my sodden clothes. The blustery air took a fair stab at drying off the lake the room had dropped on us, but large patches of wetness lingered. My shoes and socks were soaked through and I had enough water down the back of my pants to reverse a drought in rural Africa. Not that they'd want it, considering.

  My left pocket held a cupful of water until I patted it, causing it to explode like a water balloon and trickle down my leg.

  We stumbled into the next room, leaving a trail of drips like translucent slugs. Our shoes made squishing, squelching noises as we walked. A tall stack of towels rested like gifts from Heaven on a low wooden bench. Plastic coat hooks and empty shelves screwed into the wall suggested a changing room, thankfully bereft of old man balls, unlike every gym changing room in the entire world.

  Stuart picked up a towel and plunged his face deep into it, emitting a delighted drone.

  "It's so warrrrrrmmmm," he said, muffled through the thick, folded material, "And soft. Oh my God, it's lovelyyyyyy. Like a hugggggggg."

  I had a go myself. He wasn't lying.

  The gentle heat of the impossibly soft, caressing fabric melted my frozen heart. I nudged myself inexplicably close to climax by pushing it against my face. It produced the exact feeling that one gets when stepping back into a beloved home after months absence, only with an added layer of joy that I, somehow, interpreted as deeply erotic. I almost had to take a seat on the wooden bench, towel shoved over my nether-regions with an innocent look all over my guilty, guilty face.

  "Yeah...yeah..." I said, half agreeing with Stuart and half sweet-talking the towel itself.

  Stuart patted down the wettest parts of his clothes and I removed my shoes with a 'shlurp'. Susan tried the only other door. It had no buttons either side or anywhere nearby, and wouldn't open. No handle or inset window either; it was a plain grey door, nothing special.

  "Ohh, another one zaps the bucket..." Stuart moaned, holding up his final stun gun and frowning as the case leaked. He placed this one gently down on the bench and stepped away.

  Water cascaded from my shoes and added to the sizeable puddle on the floor. The stitching that held them together appeared depressed, lacklustre, like it might at any moment give up on life. A section of sole had split from the leather-like upper part. It came as no shock that they, the cheapest pair available in the shop on the day I bought them, did not hold up to an outrageous beating from water and hot, relentless air. I was surprised that my pants, bought under the exact same conditions, hadn't also fallen to pieces in tragically comedic protest.

  -

  Susan rapped her knuckles against the grey door a split second before it zipped aside to reveal a short, portly being in a colourless plastic suit. She almost had a baby right there and then; the fright she suffered came perilously close to manifesting into a real human child inside her, before rapidly incubating and bursting from her womb. That's how scared she was.

  Luckily for everyone involved, especially whichever lackey had the job of mopping up the floor, she simply appeared on the other side of the room and dug her nails into Stuart's shoulder whilst they both screamed. I can't say I saw her move.

  The figure had no face, only a square piece of clouded plastic set inside the helmet that covered its head. The suit was some sort of protective measure, designed to keep out contaminants or parasites or something else infectious. An outfit a scientist would wear at a radioactive dig-site, though nothing covered the hands. Thankfully they were humanoid, if a little hairy and purple thanks to the airtight rubber bands around the wrists. At least they lacked claws and didn't clutch some sort of skin-frying ray gun.

  Tubes sprouted from the suit's shoulders and laced down its back, serving some unknown function. Thick zips held the helmet in place.

  The figure stepped inside, distorting the atmosphere of the room. It was fine when they stood beyond the threshold, even if the sudden appearance made Susan run for the hills, but stepping inside messed with the equilibrium. An unknown entity in full haz-mat suit has the uncanny ability to pop a balloon full of fear and spray everyone with a fine mist. I considered making a break for the elevator, risking the All-Weather Room again, when the man spoke.

  Thanks to the all-encompassing helmet, his voice sounded like it came from another room or through an elderly PA system with a dodgy sub-woofer. It muffled his words and challenged us to decipher them. At the same time it made him faintly ridiculous.

  "Hello all," he said, slow and deliberate like a children's entertainer, with a palpably false enthusiasm. In just two words, he banished all remaining spookiness. A faceless, silent humanoid in a shiny white suit is scary; a man who sounds like he's about to teach you about numbers often isn't.

  Nelson, for once the boldest of the group, demanded to know where we were.

  "Firstly, please allow me to apologise for the previous room. It is designed for use when exiting the building wearing these suits or other robust, protective clothing. It is a cleanliness measure to rid users of any nasty cling-ons. There must have been an error that triggered when you passed through - it does not typically trigger the sequence if no toxic material is present. We do not use it...often," he said.

  "The only error was this bastard, he pressed the red button. The toxic material was his stupid brain. I've told him to never touch any red buttons again," said Stuart.

  The man, as best he could with no visible face upon which to express emotion, suffered a mild distress. He turned slightly as if in thought, then waved a strained hand at Nelson. "Be thankful he did not press the green one. Please follow me."

  He turned, rustling in his suit. I decided he looked like a bargain-store astronaut.

  "Wait, what does the green one do? Who are you?" Stuart asked. Susan moved to stand behind him. Nelson was next to me. I was, unfortunately, closest to the door and therefore the man.

  "Follow me," he repeated.

  A poke in the back urged me to be bold.

  "We're not going anywhere until we get answers," I declared, literally stomping my foot down, making a small splash in the puddle.

  "Follow me...for answers," the man said, shooting down my only gambit. Then he left the room. There was a collective shrug, with only Stuart holding his shoulders firm; he didn't trust the situation.

  "At least he isn't a zombie?" I said.

  "How do you know?" Stuart said, waving his hand all over his face, primitively pointing out the mask.

  "Well, okay...at least he isn't a great big hulking brute of a zombie that chases us and crashes into walls."

  "It's a step up..." Susan agreed.

  We followed him.

  For answers.