Zom-B Underground (13 page)

“I’ve put too much work into this project to see it hijacked now,” Dr. Cerveris says petulantly. “Once we’ve run off these invaders, I’ll track down whoever was responsible for the attack and flay their flesh from their hides.”

“So you aren’t helping us out of humanitarian concern?” I jeer.

“Of course not,” Dr. Cerveris says. “You aren’t human.”

I shake my head admiringly. He might be a son of a bitch, but at least he stays true to himself, even during a crisis.

We pick up Tiberius from his cell–it’s quiet down his corridor and he had no idea that anything was amiss–then push on. A couple of corners later, we run into a pair of reviveds. They go wild when they catch the scent of Reilly and Dr. Cerveris. They hurl themselves at the humans. Reilly fires but misses. Before the zombies can take him, we wrestle them to the ground and hold them there while Reilly takes aim and shoots.

I hate doing this, helping him kill, but we have no choice. It’s Reilly and Dr. Cerveris or the reviveds. And while my sympathies should lie with the zombies who’ve been imprisoned and maltreated, I can’t stop thinking of myself as one of the living.

Mark’s cell is next on our route. The door’s open but he’s cowering inside, hunched over in a corner, tears streaming down his face. (Those new drops are miraculous. Even with everything else that’s going on, I feel a stab of jealousy and wonder why the rest of us have been denied them.)

“Mark!” Reilly barks. “Get your arse in gear. We’re moving out.”

Mark looks up and shakes his head. He opens his mouth to say something, but nothing emerges.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, stepping towards him.

“Leave the little worm,” Cathy grunts.

“Yeah,” Gokhan sneers. “He’s acting like a baby, eh?”

“He’s coming with us,” Dr. Cerveris says with unusual warmth.
He shoves past me and crouches by Mark’s side. “Come on, Mark. We have to get out of here. We’re going to take you to a safe place.”

Mark stares at the scientist. A shadow flickers across his eyes and for a moment it looks to me as if he blinked. But of course that’s impossible. The drops are good, but nothing can be
that
good, not for a zom head with paralyzed eyelids.

“Is he out there?” Mark whimpers, his gaze shooting towards the open doorway.

“Who?” Dr. Cerveris frowns.

Mark’s gloved right hand is twitching by his side, fingers drumming the floor. But when I steal a closer look, I realize he isn’t drumming—he’s
squashing
. There are lots of dark smudges on either side of him. They could be ink blots, but I know that they’re not.

They’re smeared spiders.

“You saw the clown,” I say, and Mark’s eyes lock on mine.

“You saw him too?” he gasps.

I nod heavily. “Mr. Dowling.”

“The button,” Mark croaks.

It wasn’t a hallucination. I’d started to doubt myself, but now I know for sure that my giggling visitor was real. There’s no time to wonder at it, though. We have to get out of here and find sanctuary.

“Come on.” I take Mark’s hand and haul him to his feet. “We need to get away before the clown comes back.”

That puts a rocket under Mark’s arse and he bounces away from me and is first out the door.

We push on, Dr. Cerveris calling the shots, leading the way. I ask Reilly about Mr. Burke, if he’s safe. Reilly says he doesn’t think my ex-teacher is in the complex at the moment, though he can’t be sure. I start to ask Dr. Cerveris, but then he stops at another door and tells Reilly to open it.

Rage steps out, cool as you like. He raises an eyebrow at us and grins. “Are we going on a picnic?”

“This is no time for levity,” Dr. Cerveris snaps. “The complex has come under attack from an unidentified enemy.”

“I heard,” Rage nods. “There was all sorts of fighting going on outside my door. I was confused at first. Then I figured it out.” He cracks his knuckles. “How bad are things, sir?”

“Critical,” Dr. Cerveris mutters. “The complex has been overrun. Our forces will regain control eventually, even if extra troops have to be summoned, but I have no confidence that stability will be resumed anytime soon. Our lives are in very real danger.”

“Do we have a plan?” Rage asks as we jog on, only Danny left to gather.

“Once we’re all together, we’ll lock ourselves into a secure room and wait.”

“That’s all you’ve come up with?” Rage asks Reilly, chuckling bleakly.

“Just be glad we came for you,” Reilly snaps. “We could have left you to rot.”

“Oh, I am glad, sir, truly,” Rage says. Then, to my astonishment, he slams an elbow into Reilly’s nose, dropping the soldier to the floor. As Reilly slumps with a muffled yelp, Rage grabs the soldier’s gun and takes it from him.

“What the hell are you–” Dr. Cerveris starts to roar.

Rage turns and jabs a finger into the doctor’s eye, popping it as easily as he would a grape. As the scientist screams, Rage sucks on his finger. “Yummy,” he grins. Then his face goes hard and he drives his hand through the side of Dr. Cerveris’s skull, cracks it open and scoops out a handful of brain.

My field of vision narrows when I spot the fresh chunks of brain. Pain shoots through me, but it’s a pleasurable pain. My
mouth falls open and I advance, the other zom heads shuffling with me, all of us focused on the juicy substance in Rage’s hand.

“Nuh-uh,” Rage jeers, and thrusts the fistful of brain into his mouth. He chews with relish and kicks back Peder as he darts towards the one-eyed doctor. “He’s all mine,” Rage barks, and swiftly shovels out more of the dead man’s brain.

I feel disappointment and start to turn away, looking for a victim of my own. Then my senses click back into place and I shake my head.

“What have you done?” I roar, startling the others. They lose their vacant look.

Rage is smirking. “A growing boy needs his vittles, that’s what my gran used to say.”

He drops the carcass of Dr. Cerveris and smiles tightly at Reilly, who is back on his feet and staring at Rage with unconcealed terror. “No need to brick it, Reilly. I’m not going to eat you. I’ve had my fill for the day.”

“Why did you kill him?” Cathy groans, staring, nauseated, at the motionless scientist. “He was trying to help us.”

“So that he could experiment on us some more?” Rage huffs. “Screw that.”

“But you were always their favorite,” Tiberius notes. “You did everything they asked. Their golden boy.”

“Yeah,” Rage says. “And they fell for it.” He savagely kicks the
corpse of Dr. Cerveris. “I’ve hated these bastards since day one. No one locks
me
up like a lab rat and gets away with it. But there was no point hitting out at them when they had the upper hand. So I waited. I had a feeling something like this would happen, that things would break down and an opportunity would present itself. I didn’t think it’d be as spectacular as this, but I was sure there’d be a bit of give somewhere along the line.”

Rage looks at Reilly and cocks his head. “You still here?”

“I didn’t think I was free to go,” Reilly says shakily.

“Well, you are.” Rage shrugs. “You weren’t the worst of them. That doesn’t mean I won’t kill you if I have to, but at the moment you’re not a threat to me, so be a sensible boy and bugger off.”

“What about my gun?” Reilly asks.

“Do I look like an idiot?” Rage snorts. “You’d put a bullet through my skull the second I gave it back to you. I’m sure you’ll pick up something in one of the ammo rooms. If you make it that far.”

Reilly looks at the rest of us for support, but nobody says anything. “Fine,” he grunts. “Damn you all too.”

He takes off at top speed, desperately searching for something to defend himself with.

I focus on Rage and the gun in his hand. Rage stares back at me, then casts his gaze over the other zom heads. For a moment I think he’s going to drop us all. But then he lowers the gun and smiles. “I would say it’s been fun and that I’m going to miss you, but I’d be lying through my teeth.”

He turns to leave.

“Where are you going?” Cathy cries.

“This way,” Rage says, then points in the opposite direction. “If you follow me, I’ll kill you, so I’d suggest you go that way.”

“What about Danny?” Mark asks. “We haven’t rescued him yet.”

“Screw him,” Rage says.

“You can’t go off by yourself,” Gokhan protests. “It’s dangerous here, innit? We should stick together.”

“Stick with you bunch of losers?” Rage laughs. “No way. So long, suckers!”

Then he flips us the finger and is gone.

We hang around like a bunch of muppets, jaws open, senses reeling, until Tiberius finally stirs. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

“What about Danny?” Mark asks.

“Do you have any idea where his cell is?” Tiberius replies.

“No.”

“Then forget about him.”

“Wait a moment.” I can’t believe what I’m thinking as I stare at the remains of Dr. Cerveris.

“You want to tuck into his brain?” Cathy sneers. “Good luck—I doubt Rage left much.”

“It’s not that—although now that you mention it…”

Scraps of brain dot the interior of the dead doctor’s head. Ignoring my feelings
of disgust, I run my fingers around it, then suck them, drawing a small burst of strength from the meager blobs. When the rest of the zom heads see that, they push in and copy me. They all come away with flecks of brain on their fingers, though I got the lion’s share of what was left.

When we’ve scraped Dr. Cerveris’s skull completely clean, I return to it, stick a hand into the hole in the doctor’s head, then feel around until I find the back of the eye that Rage didn’t puncture. I push softly while cutting around the flesh at the front of the socket with my other hand.

“What’s she doing?” Cathy squeals. “Has she gone mad?”

“I don’t think so,” Tiberius mutters. “The sensors… If we want to get out of here, we’ll have to get through doors that require fingerprints and a retinal scan.”

Dr. Cerveris’s eye oozes from its socket. I wipe the goo away, cup it gently in my palm and step back. “I did the eye. Who’s gonna cut off one of his hands?”

There’s a pause. Then Gokhan bends and starts slicing.

“This is
so
gross,” Cathy moans, but her lips are twitching and I can tell she’s trying hard not to smile. I feel like chuckling too. It shouldn’t be funny, but it is. I’m sure I’ll feel awful later when I look back on this, but right now I’m on an unnatural high.

“Nice of him to lend us a hand,” Tiberius deadpans, and I almost explode with laughter. I’m not the only one.

“Come on,” Mark snaps. He doesn’t find this in any way entertaining. “If we’re to escape, we’ll need to be quick, before they find us.”

“Who are
they
, Worm?” Peder snorts.

“The soldiers or the people who attacked.” Mark shrugs. “One’s as bad as the other, right?”

“What if they’re here to free us?” Cathy says. “Maybe it’s an army of zom heads come to break us out.”

I remember Mr. Dowling and the spiders. “No,” I sigh. “I don’t know who or what they are, but they haven’t come to help us. Mark’s right. We need to split ASAP, before we end up like Dr. Cerveris.”

I start off in the direction that Rage sent us, not wanting to risk a run-in with him, and after a moment of hesitation the rest of them fall in behind me.

I think about the butchered Dr. Cerveris as we progress, worrying about what happened. It wasn’t the fact that Rage killed him that bugs me. It’s how I reacted. I was on the verge of losing control. The sight of the brain triggered something inside me, and I almost switched off and went into full-on zombie mode.

I would have eaten anybody’s brain right then. If I hadn’t recovered my wits by chance, I’d have gone after Reilly. If I’d killed him and feasted, that would have been the end of me. I know that fresh brains are essential for revitalizeds, that I need to eat to hold on to my senses. But if I’d given in to my baser instincts and fed in such a
grisly, inhuman fashion, I think I would have regressed anyway, and gladly, all too happy to leave my conscious self behind.

I’m clinging onto my semi-humanity, but only just. It won’t be long now. Soon I’ll hit a critical point and then it’s bye-bye, Becky Smith,
hellooooo
, zom-B!

We flee without any real plan in mind. I ask the others, as we run, if they have an idea of the layout of the complex, if they’ve seen more of it than I have. They all reply negatively. Mark has been to a lab that the rest of us haven’t visited, but it wasn’t far from zom HQ.

“I’ve always assumed we were underground,” Tiberius says, “because of the lack of daylight. But that’s not necessarily the case. We might simply be in the middle of a huge building.”

“No,” Peder says. “I once heard a soldier grumbling about being stuck down here. Reilly told him to shut up–I don’t think they were supposed to mention anything about where we are–but it was too late.”

“Then I guess we need to head for the top,” I grunt. “Let’s look for stairs.”

We push open every door that we pass and peer through every window. In the dark glass of one pane I catch sight of my reflection and pause. There’s a small red
z
on my right cheek. I frown, wondering how it got there. Then I recall the clown stroking my face. Shivering, I wipe the mark from my flesh and hurry on.