Falling Apart (14 page)

Mum and Dad were pleased to see me. Mum waved her knitting, which now looked set to beat her
Doctor Who
scarf records, and Dad smiled vaguely from behind his mask. I read Dad a few of the more salacious headlines from the copy of
The Times
that I'd picked up on my way in and then, when he seemed to drop into a doze, I took Mum to one side and stilled her knitting with one hand.

‘Any idea when they're going to let Dad go home?'

A sharp, blue-eyed look. ‘He's doing well, so hopefully the end of the week.' The wool coiled onto her lap. ‘Jess?'

I shook my head. It wasn't safe,
it wasn't safe
 …

But she was my mother. She'd known me for the entire thirty-one years of my life, she'd known me since my pregnant teenage mother had turned up at the shelter, afraid of the demon who'd fathered her child, she'd pretended that I was her own baby for my safety. She knew me. ‘Is he there?' she whispered, barely more than a breath.

I gave one, short nod.

‘Oh,
Jessie.
' It wasn't exasperation, it was fear with a little bit of hope mixed in. ‘We saw the news. Can you do anything?'

‘I don't know, Mum. But I'm trying.'

The door opened and my sister came in. ‘Oh, hello, Jess.'

We gave each other slightly awkward air-kisses. It wasn't so much the fourteen-year age gap that made us stiff with one another, more the nasty things she'd said about me when I'd had to pretend to kill my best friend in front of her. It was to save the world, but obviously Abigail didn't regard that as a suitable excuse. She gave our mum a much more exuberant greeting and went to check on Dad.

‘He's sleeping,' I said, unnecessarily, but to distract Abbie from wondering why I looked a bit shell-shocked.

‘Mmmm.' She made some notes while Mum picked up her knitting again. ‘We're just a bit concerned about that seizure …'

‘Oh.' Mum's hands stopped. ‘It was a bit odd. I didn't think people had fits when they had a heart attack.'

Abbie, looking like an efficient sausage in her slightly-too-tight uniform, I thought disloyally, fiddled with the monitor. ‘They don't, usually. And he's no history of fitting or seizures either. What exactly happened, Mum?'

Half of me listened to my mother detailing how she had taken the post through to Dad, gone into the kitchen and heard a crash, gone running and found my father on the floor in the living room clutching his chest. How, as soon as she'd come into the room he'd started thrashing his limbs about. The other half of me could only see Sil, stretched out on the couch in the same room, eyes flickering from silver to metal grey. I bit my tongue.

‘Look, I'll come back later,' I said. It was beginning to sound like an episode of
Casualty
in here, and while I could be
fairly
sure that a handsome doctor wasn't going to come in and be involved in our family affairs, I really didn't want to take any chances. ‘When Dad's awake.'

After elbowing my way through the rather jaded hacks still camping out on the office step, groaning at my customary ‘No comment,' I went to take out my anxieties on Liam.

Who had no nose.

I did a double-take that nearly knocked me out of the door before I realised that it wasn't Liam, it was Richard sitting in Liam's chair. And he seemed to be lacking in the finger department too. ‘Hello, Richard.'

‘I was just about to text. Richard wants to talk to you.' Liam popped up from behind my desk and drew to me to one side. ‘He seems upset,' he murmured. ‘From what I can tell, anyway. There are things missing, you know. Bits. Parts.'

‘And I am most expressly not going to ask any questions about that,' I muttered back, and then perched on the edge of Liam's desk and took a closer look at the zombie. As well as lacking nose and fingers, he'd got a gaping gash down the side of his neck, and the overalls he wore for his warehouse job were ripped down one seam. His head was slumped forwards and his cartoon-chick hair was completely awry. ‘Trouble?'

‘Those two blokes that you had a word with last night. They came back.' Richard held up his right hand to show that his two middle fingers were missing, and the tip of his thumb had gone too. ‘It was … I couldn't fight them, Jess, they had fire and knives and—' He stopped talking suddenly.

I jumped up and laid a hand on Richard's arm. It felt like a roll of carpet, but was shaking slightly. ‘Liam, pop across the road for a tube of superglue, will you?'

‘I think there's some ordinary in the kitchen.'

‘We can push the boat out for Richard, I think. Besides, he can't drive a forklift with his fingers missing, so it's an allowable expense, unlike your bloody trousers.' When Liam, muttering, had run off down the stairs, I turned to the zombie. ‘What's happened?'

He looked directly at me, his lower eyelids stretching upwards, which was the nearest a zombie could get to crying. ‘They threatened to harm my wife.'

Shit.
I moved closer to him. He smelled of the PVA wash that all the zombies used, with a faint, desperate overlay of Lynx covering the surprisingly sweet scent of corpse. But he
wasn't
a corpse – just because he couldn't feel anything didn't mean he wasn't a person. He was just dead, that was all. ‘What happened? Richard?'

‘They … they waited until morning, until I got back from the warehouse and they jumped me. Had a knife to Suze's throat while I … I tried, I honestly tried to fight but …' He held up the mangled hand. ‘Said it was “to teach me a lesson”, so I'd know my place, something like that.' His spiky hair flopped, as though it too had lost heart. ‘When they left we … I … I took her to a friend's, and came here. They said they'd be back, you see.' He stopped talking, as if his throat had run out of words, and raised his head so that his deep eyes met mine. ‘They said they'd be back.' His voice lowered to a miserable whisper. ‘I didn't know where to go. These … blokes are human, it's me being – well, what I am – that's got them so angry. If I start reporting things and making it all official and getting the vamps involved …' His eyes flickered as confusion reigned behind them. ‘I'm afraid of where it will end. I just want it sorted … I didn't know where to go,' he repeated, elongating the last word as his emotion strangled the sentence.

I took another breath. ‘Okay, you did the right thing. We can sort this out without getting Otherworld Central involved. Course we can.' I patted the log-like arm again. ‘I just need to think. Your wife, is she somewhere she feels safe? With people who will look after her?'

‘Her friend is taking her to the Centre.' The place where zombies went to get professional patching-up and any other death-care needs.

‘Well, that's good, she'll be protected there. But they won't intervene; they won't do anything practical, you know that?'

‘That's why I came to you, Jess. I want Suze safe.'

I felt slightly sick now. I'd dismissed those men as just chancers, random attackers picking on a zombie out alone and unprotected, but, combined with the man I'd seen following the zombie through town, and the group watching Ryan, it looked as though they were part of some concerted hate group against the zombies. Had I
complicated things by intervening?

‘We need to get you fixed.'

‘It's all right, I've got some mastic at home. It's the fingers that are the real problem, can't do those single-handed and without them I won't be able to load the forklift and I can't afford …' The reality of the situation seemed to crash around him. ‘I can't afford to lose my job.' He reached into a pocket and pulled the recalcitrant digits out, laying them down on the table, where they rolled like tipped wax crayons.

‘I'm sorry, Richard,' I patted his arm again. ‘If I hadn't got involved the other night …'

‘No. That's not it.' The zombie gave me a small, and slightly scary, grin. Zombies are largely harmless, motivated pretty much by the need to keep everything – literally – together, but even so there's something unnerving about the undead baring their teeth at you. ‘It's been worse lately anyway. They're going around, picking on any of us they think they can damage – if it hadn't been me it would have been someone else. I just wish …'—his head dropped forwards again—‘this life.
My
life, such as it is … all of us, we're just trying to make the best of it. To be useful, to earn ourselves a place … It's so
easy
for you humans, you think …' His eyes flickered again as his long-defunct tear ducts tried to respond to his emotion. ‘I only wish they could walk a mile in my shoes. See what I see. Know what my life is like.'

I pulled a face. On my computer the Tracker program was running and everything looked normal; not for the first time I cursed its stupid bias, I could have done with tracking a few humans right now. I wondered if Sil was already in the system, flicking through the files, using our software to search.

I need him.
At first I thought I was only feeling like this because I wanted him here, helping, his knowledge of the anti-zombie fraternity, his insight. And then it struck me.
I want him here just to have him here. Even if he knew nothing, even if he could offer no more help than holding Richard's arm steady so we could stick his fingers back on straight. I'd want him because he's Sil.
The realisation that I'd become so completely unobjective made me wobble for a moment. When had this happened? I'd been so sure that if Sil turned out to be unreliable, unpredictably given to moments of blood-savagery, I would turn him in for the final justice to be dealt … and now it was slowly dawning on me, the feeling rising like the return of a bad kebab at three in the morning – I couldn't.

Up until now I'd half thought that our relationship was something that burned so brightly that it would die in a flame of its own making, splutter and peter out into hello's on street corners and the occasional ‘do you remember'. But now … Now Sil was somewhere in my heart, as he was in my head. We just needed to work out how to move to the next level, the trusting and accepting level. Oh, and the not being shot by Hunters for breaking the Treaty bit, as well.

Oh bugger.

My temporary vulnerability vanished when Liam arrived back, carrying two new tubes of glue.
Someone
had to be in charge here, and I'd rather it wasn't a man who thought
Doctor Who
should be declared a religion. ‘Right, that's the last time I can show my face in that newsagents: they either think I'm an inveterate glue-sniffer or I build
really big
plastic models.' He tipped the superglue onto the table. ‘And I don't know which is worse.'

‘This coming from a man with a TARDIS in his living room. Which, I have to mention, you built yourself.'

‘We're going to use it as Charlotte's play-pen when she's older.' Liam busied himself with neatly snipping the lids off the glue rolls and throwing the plastic discards into the bin.

‘You're unnatural, you know that?' I watched him pick up Richard's first finger and examine the gristly surface for stickability.

‘But unnatural in a good, and overall efficient, way.' He married up the two ends and pushed the joint together.

‘I was an extra in
Doctor Who
once,' Richard said. He seemed to be feeling better now that something was being done. ‘Me and my mates. We had to get blown up. Got a bit boring after the third take, and, you know, they promised us they'd put everything back the way they found it, but I've still got a kneecap somewhere in Cardiff.'

Liam and I exchanged a look and a grin. ‘Right. That seems to be attached.' He stood back to examine his hand-made hands.

‘Head back to work, but be careful,' I said to the zombie. ‘Make sure you always go around together: these bully boys won't tackle you in groups.'

Richard sighed. It made a kind of church organ sound. ‘It's not right, Jess,' he said, standing up. ‘They're making us into second-class citizens. But who is it that they call for if some nuclear power station needs clearing out, or someone wants some old explosives got rid of? You humans, you need us for the dangerous stuff but you don't want us to have any rights or anything. Oh, present company excepted, obviously.'

‘I know.' I showed him to the office door. ‘Something has to be done. I'll have a think, okay?'

The zombie shuffled out and down the stairs in a backwash of PVA. He was right, that was the problem. Zombies did the unpleasant, deadly jobs that no human would, or could, do – being already dead was a huge advantage in lots of professions. But they weren't paid or treated like humans, just expected to get on with it and be grateful that the humans had found them a niche. It made me grind my teeth with the unfairness of it all.

Liam had gone back to his desk, but when I came back in he got up, without a word, and headed to the kitchen. I heard the kettle and furtive rustling as he fetched the biscuits he fondly imagined to be cunningly concealed behind the emergency bucket.

I pulled up the Tracker program and sat watching it for a few moments. Sil, like Zan, was allowed to move without permits, so didn't register, but that didn't stop me from zooming out on Google Maps and staring at the farmhouse. The picture had been taken about three years ago, Dad's old Land Rover was parked on the driveway and the big tree still grew alongside the top barn.
God, I wish I could go back to that time. Everything was simple then.

‘Talk to me, Jess.' Liam nudged a mug towards my hand, making me jump. I'd been so deeply sunk that I'd not heard him come back, and I hurried to minimise the incriminating picture.

‘About what?' I drank a mouthful of scalding coffee to give my face time to assume an innocent expression.