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by Everheart, AJ

  “Yes…No. I don’t know,” he gulps. He sits back at his desk, eyes watery. “She was a determined, smart woman. She thought she was helping solve the overpopulation issue, making a better world. But she adored you. I don’t know what was going on in her head during the final months. She was…different.”

  I fiddle with my fingers as I let everything sink in for a moment. My parents were not the people I thought they were. My father, a soldier, my hero as a child, was at the root of this along with the woman I was constantly told I was the double of. They were strangers who looked like me, but we weren’t the same. I wasn’t like her. I could never do this.

  Slowly, I begin to voice the thoughts in my head. “So, you knew about the outbreak and the government using this virus? You knew it was coming?” Please say no, my mind thinks, even though my heart knows it would be a lie.

  “Yes.” There’s no hesitation.

  “Mum created it, and you helped get it into the world…” How could they?

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” I ask, I can hear an echo of sadness in my words. I felt like a cup that was about to overflow with emotion, nothing I did would prevent it from spilling over the edges.

  My father sighs, as if he’s tired of justifying it to himself. “Because it’s what she wanted. She believed it would create a better world for you. For your children. We never saw it going like this.”

  I stand, and I cannot stop the shout that leaves my lips. “No, you thought it would be like a fucking badger cull and that the people who survived wouldn’t bat an eyelid.”

  He reaches out for me, but I pull away. I can see the regret on his face, the worn-down expression he wears as he’s finally realised what a mistake he’s made, but I can’t look at him in the same way right now. Those creatures, out there, rotting and feasting on human flesh aren’t the only monsters in the world.

  “Mia, you don’t understand. Overpopulating is a genuine issue—”

  I calm myself, I wasn’t a child anymore. I couldn’t have a tantrum or scream ‘I hate you’ at him, that wouldn’t get me anywhere. I slow my angry breathing down and release the fists that I hadn’t noticed had clenched up into tight balls.

  I look into his eyes as I coldly interrupt, “It isn’t now. Everyone is dead, and you had a massive hand in that.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Alex

  I see Mia and her father leave, her face is blank, and I know underneath she’s a mess. I want to follow her, comfort her, but I can’t. I stayed glued to my spot until they disappear, Mia heading back to our room and her father for the secret bunker that leads to the shady underground research lab. I make quick work of the lock on the door to his rooms. His living quarters are larger than ours and consist of a sleeping area with a small sofa and a workspace. It’s the cork board I’m after, as last time we were in here there was something that sparked in my brain about the 14th of February being the outbreak date.

  Pinned to the board is his calendar, exactly where it was last time, and the 14th of last year is clearly circled. Underneath, in small scrawl, I can see, ‘Mia, Rosehill.’ Could he have written it in after? I start going through the other pieces of papers pinned to the wall, they’re mostly invoices and emails, but he clearly considered them important. There’s no internet these days, no way to send an email. At Basecamp, we had to use radios, and it looks like it’s no different here. They may have electricity up and running for their fancy laboratory, but the computers must literally be for calculations and storing data.

  I shuffle through papers filled with dashes and dots, and it takes me a moment to realise that they’re in Morse code. On some of them, Hazeldine has written the meaning underneath, but most of them are just code. I find one that says the water plant for central London is up and running. Another scrap of paper states that the reservoir in Llandegfedd that feeds South Wales will be ready soon. I guess the rumours were true. Maybe Hazeldine’s plan to disseminate the vaccine through the water supply isn’t so crazy after all.

  Under a pile of invoices, I find what I’m looking for. Instructions for the coaches to make their way to Rosehill Academy, arranged two weeks before the outbreak. This was the proof I needed that Colonel Hazeldine knew what was coming. He knew the world was about to go to shit, and he only tried to save Mia. I scrunch the paper up in my fist as my anger starts to swell in my chest. Biting it back, I pocket this piece of evidence to show Mia. I wouldn’t hide this from her, I wouldn't, not after everything.

  I leave the room as I find it except for the email I’ve stolen. It feels like lead in my pocket, and I know it’s going to break Mia’s heart. She acts like this big tough girl with a bow, and man, she can be scary, but she’s still a fresh-faced schoolgirl underneath it all. She’s been hidden from the darkness of the world, and the more I learn about Hazeldine, the more I think it’s a deliberate sheltering of his baby girl.

  I open the door to our quarters and find her sat on the chair in the corner of the room. She gives me the ghost of a smile as I walk in, but her face screams sadness. I take a deep breath, I don’t want to add to her burdens, but I can’t keep her in the dark either. I kneel before her, placing my hand over hers.

  “Mia…your old man knew about the virus and when it was going to be released.”

  I wait for her reaction, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t even blink as she evenly replies, “I know.”

  “What?”

  She sighs softly, as if she were Atlas and the weight of the world was heavy on her shoulders. “We talked about it this morning, before I saw you creeping into his quarters.”

  Her words startle me; does that mean her father had noticed me too?

  “You saw me?”

  She smiles again. “Of course I did. Anyway, it turns out my mother developed the original strain.”

  The way the words fall evenly from her lips makes me frown. My head takes a second to wrap around her words, and when it does, I’m even more confused than before.

  “Wait, what?”

  Mia tucks her hair behind her ear, and in that moment, she looks incredibly young,

  vulnerable almost, and I know that I’d die to protect her.

  “It’s how she died. This whole thing was her idea, along with a few other cuckoo scientists. Once she passed, the government sent it out to scientific bases across the globe, and it became a race to see who could destroy the world first.”

  I squeeze her hand gently as I think about what she’s just revealed. Her dead mother was the root of this apocalypse? My schoolgirl was at the centre of everything, the end of the world at her feet.

  I rub my face with my free hand and lean back on my knees. “Fuck...Mia, that’s a lot to deal with.”

  She pulls her hand away. “Why? I didn’t do this. I would do anything to stop it. I am not my parents.”

  She’s defensive, and I can’t imagine how she’s feeling. What does this mean for us now? I grab her hand and lace my fingers through hers. I’m not letting her shut me out, this is the end of the world, there’s no time for crossed wires or petty arguments. She can take her indignation and shove it, because I won’t let that come between us.

  “I didn’t mean that. It’s all just a bit of a headfuck.”

  She stands and helps me to my feet. There’s a determined look on her face, and it’s the one she wore when we escaped the cottages, when we hid from the zombies and when she tried to convince me to have sex with her. It tells me that she isn’t taking this lying down—Mia Hazeldine is a survivor, and she’s going to fight.

  “The vaccine is almost ready, they want to get it to London by the end of the month.”

  I know that she intends to be part of the group that goes, she doesn’t need to say it—her face gave it all away. I’ll be right beside her the whole time. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like someone has my back the way she does, and if I don’t hold onto that, then what have I got in this shitshow of a life?

  “I didn’t think they
were that close.” Hazeldine has clearly been keeping the vaccine tight under wraps. He made it sound like it was just an idea they were working on, something that wasn’t ready, and yet, here he was telling Mia it was in the final stages.

  She nods. “It just has some testing to undergo, and then they’ll start planning the trip.”

  My mind flits back to the lab the other night. “Testing?”

  She pulls me into a tight hug, her head against my shoulder, nose pressed into the crook of my neck. “I don’t know what testing, but I’ve told my father he can’t keep us on the outside anymore. We deserve to be kept in the loop.”

  I agree, I’m just not sure we’re ready to know the ins and outs of the testing they’ve been doing. It’s something that’s plagued my mind since we saw the laboratory, and there’s only one conclusion I keep coming back to time and time again…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mia

  At midnight, my father sends a soldier to our room to bring us down to the lab. I knew it was happening, but I still jumped when I heard that sharp knock on our door. Alex says nothing as he takes my hand in his and we walk across the base. We move through the various outbuildings, bunkers, and hangars in silence. The rest of the camp are in their beds, dreaming of a day when we don’t have to live trapped like mice, unaware of the zombies right under them. It sends a shiver down my spine to think about it, I force myself to remember that it’s for a good cause. The only cause: our survival.

  Alex’s face is serious as he goes through the door and down the corridor first. It’s like he’s trying to shield me with his body, and while I find it oddly comforting, it’s also awkward because I keep tripping on the back of his feet.

  The soldier leads us into a room with a large glass window overlooking an even larger room below us. There are several chairs, and I spot my father sat next to three doctors, so Alex and I take a seat behind him. The room below is tiled white, brightly lit with one door. There’s a metal grate on the opposite side that looks almost like some sort of mesh wire cage.

  A young soldier and a doctor walk into the room, they don’t look at one another until my father signals for them to begin. The doctor hooks the soldier up with two wires to his chest and a metal band with yet more wires fitted around his head. The red cables feed across the room to a monitor, and something about the setup feels off to me. The doctor pours a blue liquid into a glass of water, and Alex tenses beside me as the soldier drinks it. Is this the vaccine? Why are they giving it to the soldier? How will they know if it has...

  My thoughts die off as the doctor leaves the room and the wire mesh lifts up to reveal a zombie at the end of a leash. This is what Alex was afraid of. More atrocities committed by my father.

  “Stop! What’re you doing?” I stand, shouting out.

  My father nods sharply at Alex, who pulls me back into my chair and wraps an arm around me. Everyone else acts like this is perfectly normal as they ignore my outburst.

  “Get off,” I hiss, struggling against him.

  “Mia, stop,” he says calmly as he holds me firmly.

  “He’s going to be bitten! He’ll die!”

  I can feel his warm breath tickle my neck as he sighs, “Mia, do you see any animals in this lab? What did you think they were going to test on?”

  I’m holding back tears now. “Not people!”

  “They have to.”

  The soldier pulls his T-shirt up over his head to leave his torso exposed before taking a deep breath and moving one step closer to the creature. Didn’t he realise what he was doing?

  “No, they don’t!”

  Alex squeezes me gently. “Then how will they know if the vaccine works?”

  “But that poor man…”

  I can’t tear my eyes away as the zombie tries to run at the man. His leash keeps him just within touching distance, all he can do is scratch at the soldier as his bony fingers reach out. The skin has decayed and worn away in some places so that the white of the bone is exposed. His fingertips are dirty, coated in dried blood and mud. A quick swipe across the soldier’s chest has droplets of blood forming. That’s enough to transfer the virus though. A bite is quicker, but a scratch is just as deadly.

  “Does he look like he’s in there against his will, Mia?”

  The man steps back calmly after the monster scratches him once more. I shake my head, why would anyone volunteer to be bitten by a zombie? The claw marks across his chest are oozing blood now as it trickles slowly down his skin. I settle back down into my seat, my breathing ragged as I try to reign in my emotions. How have we come to this?

  The zombie is dragged back into his cage, but not before I take note of the camo trousers it appears to be wearing. The doctor rushes back in and ties the soldier’s hands behind his back. He appears to set a time on the monitor screen before dashing out once again. The room is tense as we wait. The air is heavy with expectation, what if it fails? I can hear almost everyone else thinking the same.

  An hour or so passes, and Alex hasn’t let go of me, he strokes my hair as silent tears fall down my face. What has our world become? We’re sacrificing our own when the human race is already dying out. If the zombies don’t finish us off, we’ll do it ourselves.

  “This isn’t the first experiment, is it?” I whisper to Alex.

  He shakes his head and confirms what I already knew. I feel sick. The zombie that attacked the soldier used to be another soldier, they were comrades. Maybe they were once friends, but that didn’t mean anything anymore. Not when the world was falling apart.

  “Why are they bringing in zombies from the wild then?”

  That sounded strange, the wild, as if they were naturally occurring creatures that existed when in fact they were man-made monsters. Alex shrugs, which moves me with him as he’s still got his arms around me.

  “I think they’re trying to chart the mutations and the rate of decay.”

  “That’s correct,” a voice from in front of us replies. The man turns around, and it’s the doctor from when we first visited the lab. He’s got slick, greasy dark hair and brown eyes that seem to be assessing us, and given the look he shoots me, he clearly is finding us lacking.

  “Dr. Landry.” His nasally voice makes my skin crawl. “We met before.”

  Alex leans in. “Why did the virus go rogue?”

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Landry seems taken aback by Alex’s question, as if he wasn’t expecting us to be curious about what was going on right in front of our eyes.

  “Well, the Colonel said it wasn’t originally supposed to kill as many as it has. It certainly wasn’t meant to turn them into cannibalistic demons.”

  Dr. Landry huffs, as if he’s tired of explaining the situation to stupid people. “There was clearly a mutation somewhere. The initial strain of the ZM8AL4 virus only targeted those with genetic defaults.”

  “A fucking genocide,” Alex hisses.

  “ZM8A…?” I try to repeat as I wipe away my tears.

  “AL4,” Dr. Landry finishes brusquely.

  “What does that mean?” Alex says.

  Dr. Landry waves a hand, as if he were swatting away a fly. “It would be a waste of my time to explain it to you since you have neither the knowledge nor the comprehension to understand it.”

  We say nothing more and continue the wait for a few more hours. A gagging noise finally fills the awkward silence, and we all turn to face the soldier, who has dropped to his knees and looks like he’s going to spew up a lung.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Alex

  The man in the room below is throwing up this horrible black tar stuff. His body purges this crap, and it just keeps coming; it seems to smoke a little as it begins to create a puddle on the floor. After about fifteen minutes, he finally stops and sits back. The whole observation room is filled with silence as we watch and wait.

  Nothing happens. Absolutely nothing. It’s been almost four hours at this point. He hasn’t turned, and I see Hazeldine’s shoulde
rs sag with relief, his vaccine may not be pretty, but it fucking works. The doctor enters the room once again and checks the readout on the monitor before giving us the thumbs-up. The soldiers and doctors in the room with us let out a huge cheer—this is a massive breakthrough for humanity. We have a fighting chance at surviving, a chance at fighting back.

  Mia kisses my hand, the one she hasn’t let go of for almost two hours now. She’s sad at what it costs us, but she understands now. It’s sunk in the price we have to pay today, to save tomorrow.

  She places her head on my shoulder. “I guess we had better prepare for London then.”

  I nod, that was our next big hurdle, but for tonight, I didn’t want to think about it. I’d spent the last four hours being wound tighter and tighter like a coil, and with the all clear, I feel like I’m ready to bounce off the walls.

  “C’mon, let’s get out of here,” I say as I stand and stretch out my legs.

  We follow everyone into the lab, where they’ve opened a bottle of whiskey and are toasting to their success. Part of me thinks it’s their fault we’re in this mess to begin with while the other part thinks we should celebrate the small victories.

  Hazeldine nods to us as we leave, and Mia looks away.

  As we’re walking through the base once again, this time as the sun is rising, I turn to her. “You know, life is short. Really fucking short these days—you shouldn’t stay mad for too long.”

  She lets out this long, weary sigh. “I don’t know if I can forgive what he’s done.”

  “He’s your father, Mia,” I say gently. Blood didn’t always count, but Hazeldine had done everything he could to try and keep Mia safe. Even if he did have a hand in bringing about the end of the world as we know it.

  “You don’t get it.” She kicks at the floor.

  I frown. “Don’t get what?”