Zom-B Underground (5 page)

Reilly finally stops at a door, opens it with a quick scan of his fingers and an eye, then gestures for me to enter. I step in, expecting a load of leather-clad, teenage zombies, but it’s only a shower room, several vacant cubicles, towels and clothes laid on a bench across from them.

“What gives?” I ask suspiciously.

“You’ve been in isolation for three weeks,” Reilly says. “You haven’t changed your clothes. I thought you might want to freshen up before you meet the others.”

“Are you saying I smell?”

“Yes.”

“No peeking,” I warn him.

He laughs. “Zombies don’t do it for me. But others will be watching.” He nods at the ceiling. “Cameras all over this place, as I’m sure you’ve figured out already.”

“Yeah. But I thought they’d leave the bloody showers alone.”

Reilly shrugs and closes the door. I gaze around, trying to spot
the cameras, but they’re masterfully concealed. “Sod it,” I mutter and undress. If some creep gets a buzz from watching a one-boobed zombie in the buff, more power to him.

The shower’s lovely, though I have to turn it up to the max to truly appreciate it. My nerve endings don’t work as well as they used to. I have to crank the heat up close to boiling before I feel warm.

I scrub carefully around the hole in my chest. I pick at the green moss and try to wash it away, but it must be rooted deeply. If I pull hard, strands come out like hairs, but I’m worried I might injure myself–I don’t know how deeply the moss is embedded and I’m afraid I might rip an even bigger hole in my chest if I persist–so I stop. I rinse down the rest of my body, smiling sadly as I rub the old
c
scar on my thigh. I used to hate that, since it was my only real physical blemish. Now, with a missing heart, it’s the least of my worries.

I massage shampoo into my scalp and try to close my eyes, forgetting that I can’t. Scowling, I tilt my head back and do my best to keep the suds away from my unprotected eyeballs.

Stepping out, I towel myself dry. The moss stays damp, except for the light layer on my right wrist where I was scratched shortly before Tyler clawed out my heart—that dries up nicely after a good bit of rubbing.

Giving up on the moss around my chest, I slip into the new clothes. Once I’m cozy, I sniff the old set and grimace. They’re not as bad as I thought they’d be, but I’m surprised I didn’t notice the odor before. Reilly should have told me.

I rap on the door and it opens immediately. “Any deodorant?” I ask.

Reilly cocks his head. “Are you being funny?”

“No.”

“Didn’t they tell you…?” He smiles. “No, I suppose it’s not the sort of thing they would have thought of. Well, it’s good news, B. You don’t ever have to worry about your pits again. The dead don’t sweat.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool,” I chuckle. Then a thought hits me and I ask with fake innocence, “What about bad breath?”

“There’s a slight smell that will always be there,” Reilly says. “But it won’t get any worse than that.”

“And farts?” I ask.

Reilly laughs. “No. You’re clear on that front too.”

“A pity,” I sigh. “I loved a good fart.” My eyes narrow and I murmur sweetly, “What about my period?”

Reilly blushes furiously. “Without a regular flow of blood? Hardly!”

“But are you sure?” I press.

“Well, not a hundred percent,” he says uneasily.

“Can you ask one of the nurses and find out for me?” I tease him.

“Ask them yourself,” he huffs, ears reddening at the thought of it.

Typical bloke—so easy to embarrass!

A large, white room. No windows, but there’s a long mirror in one of the walls. I’ve seen enough films and TV shows to guess that it’s a two-way observation point. I bet there’s a team of soldiers or scientists on the other side, watching everything.

There’s a pool table and a ping-pong table down at one end of the room. A bookshelf with a scattering of books, magazines and comics. A couple of TVs, one hooked up to a DVD player, the other to a video-game console. There’s a table close to that TV, loaded with games and a few iPods. A variety of couches and chairs are positioned around the place.

A couple of the zom heads are playing pool. Three are busy gaming. One–the girl called Cathy–is watching TV and
filing down her teeth. And the final zom head is slumped on a chair near the bookshelf, flicking through a car magazine.

Seven in total. One more than I saw in the room all those weeks ago.

I hover by the door–Reilly didn’t say anything when he let me in–waiting for the others to notice me. Finally one of the guys playing pool looks up and shouts, “Hey! It’s the girl who kicked Rage’s arse!”

Everything comes to a stop and those who were sitting stand up to ogle me, all except the one in the chair with the magazine. He just glances at me, yawns, then returns to his mag.

I push forward, smiling awkwardly. “Hi. I’m Becky Smith, but everyone calls me B.”

“Becky it is,” one of the boys laughs, and jogs across. He sticks out a hand—it’s covered by a glove and bandages. “I’m Mark,” he says as we shake hands. “I wasn’t there when you revitalized. They keep me out of stuff like that. Afraid I’ll react badly to the flames.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

The boy gestures at himself. He’s covered completely from neck to toe, heavy clothes, some sort of a padded vest, more bandages, heavy-duty boots. “I got burned to the bone while I was a revived. They don’t know how. My face is okay but I’m like a skeleton under all these layers. I have to stay wrapped up. They’re worried that if I lose any more internal–”

“Can it, Worm,” one of the other boys says. “You’d bore her to death if she wasn’t already dead.” He nods at me but doesn’t smile. He’s dark-skinned, with short curly hair. I would have shot him the finger six months ago in response to his nod. But since I’m trying to change and accept everyone as an equal, no matter what color they are, I nod back at him instead.

“B,” I tell him.

“I know,” he says drily. “I’m not deaf. I’m Peder.”

“Danny,” the boy beside him says. Danny’s tall and bony. Greasy blond hair and bad acne. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt like mine. As I look around, I see that all of the others are similarly dressed, except for the guy in the chair. He’s in the leathers he was wearing when I first saw him.

“Cathy Kelly,” the girl introduces herself coldly. She sits and focuses on the video game. She has long, dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Pretty, but not in a soft way.

One of the other boys comes over and shakes my hand. “Gokhan.”

“
Gherkin
?” I frown.

“Gokhan.” He spells it out. “Turkish, innit?”

He’s plump and relaxed-looking. Olive skin. Large, pudgy fingers. He’s filed down the bones sticking out of the tips and painted them with swirling, colorful designs.

“And I’m Tiberius,” the other guy who was playing pool says. He’s the one who first spotted me. He’s short, with ginger hair and loads of freckles.

“Tiberius?” I laugh automatically. “What sort of a dumb name is that?”

“I was named after the river Tiber in Rome,” he says stiffly. Then he turns his back on me, offended, and snaps at Mark, “Are you playing or what, Worm?”

“In a minute,” Mark says. “I want to show B round first. Don’t you want to get to know her? She’s one of us now.”

“Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t,” the boy in the chair says. He finally stands, cracks his knuckles over his head and makes a yawning motion. I know from practicing in my cell that we can mimic the habits of the past, when we had a set of fully functioning lungs. I even find myself yawning or sneezing by accident sometimes, my body remembering happier, simpler days.

The yawning knuckle cracker is the tall guy with the big head and small ears, the chubby, rosy cheeks, a chunk bitten out of the left one. The guy I clobbered over the head when I first recovered.
Rage.

“Of course she’s one of us,” Mark says. “She can talk, can’t she?”

“Oh, she’s a revitalized,” Rage says, eyeing me beadily. “Doesn’t mean she’s a zom head though. You’ve gotta earn that right. Which
you
haven’t yet, Worm, in case you’d forgotten.”

Mark scowls and stares at his feet. “It’s not my fault they don’t let me join in with the rest of you. I would if I could. You know that.”

“You say that you would,” Rage sneers. “But there’s saying and there’s doing, and so far you’ve done zip. For all we know, you’ve
cried off and asked to be excused regular duties. Maybe the burns are a sham. Maybe they’re just saying that because you asked them to cover up for the fact that you’re a coward.”

Mark stiffens, then squares himself and raises his fists. His hands are shaking, more with fear, I think, than indignation. “Say that again and I’ll thump you,” he squeaks. “I don’t care how big you are.”

Rage laughs. “Back down, Worm. I’m only messing with you.”

He comes closer and circles me slowly. I say nothing while I’m being examined. When he’s finished, I stare at him calmly. “Like what you see?”

“Not a lot,” he sniffs. “I don’t think Cathy has much to worry about.”

“Why should I be worried?” the girl barks, looking up from her game.

“You’ve been queen bee round these parts,” Rage says. “You know that all the boys fancy you, since they’ve no one else to lust after. Nobody would want to lose that sort of a following. And I don’t think you will. No offense,
Becky
.”

“Get stuffed,” I snarl.

Rage cocks his head. “Are you a tough girl?” he whispers. “You are, aren’t you? A fighter, yeah?”

“Wind me up and find out,” I challenge him, fingers curling by my sides.

Rage glances at my fingers, then studies my eyes. “Looks like I was wrong. You
are
one of us.”

“We accept you, gooble gobble,” Tiberius chuckles from beside the pool table.

“What the hell does that mean?” I growl.

“Pay no attention to him,” Gokhan laughs. “He’s always coming out with weird crap like that.”

“It’s from
Freaks
,” Tiberius says. “That old movie about circus freaks.” He looks around for support. “Some of you must have seen it.”

“Was it black-and-white?” Cathy asks.

“Yeah. It was made in the 1930s.”

“Then of course we haven’t seen it,” she snorts. “We don’t all waste our time on boring old movies.”

“
Freaks
, boring?” Tiberius roars. “It’s an amazing film. They used real-life freaks. It gave me nightmares the first time my dad showed it to me.”

“They’d probably have found a role for
you
in it if you’d been alive back then,” Cathy says frostily.

Tiberius glares at her, then turns to me. “Anyway, at one point a normal woman marries one of the freaks and they have a big party to welcome her into the family. They all start chanting,
We accept you, gooble-gobble.
They mean it nicely, but what they’re really saying is that she’s one of them now, a freak, an outcast, a child of the damned.”

Tiberius bends over the pool table to take a shot, then says again, but glumly this time, as if he feels sorry for me, “We accept you, gooble-gobble.”

I spend the rest of the day with the zom heads, getting to know them. It’s awkward. None of us wants to be here. We haven’t chosen each other for company. We come from different parts of London, Danny from as far out as Bromley. We don’t have much in common, except for the fact that we were all killed when the zombies attacked.

“Do you remember much about that day?” I ask Mark. I’m with him, Gokhan and Tiberius on one of the couches close to the mirror.

“No,” he says. “I was at school. Things went mad. I was running. I didn’t even know why. I was part of a pack, doing what everybody else was. I thought someone had a gun and was shooting people,
like they do in America. Then something struck the side of my head and I blacked out. Next thing I knew, I was waking up here, wrapped up tighter than a bloody Mummy.”

“What about you?” I ask the others.

They shake their heads.

“We’ve gone over this dozens of times,” Tiberius says. “It was pretty much all we talked about for the first few weeks. Everyone was at school, except Rage, who was in a shopping center with his girlfriend. Zombies attacked. We were bitten. We revitalized here.”

“Were you locked into your school?”

Tiberius frowns. “What?”

“The exits were blocked in mine. We couldn’t get out.”

“What, someone actually stopped you from escaping?” Mark gasps.

“Yeah. We tried two different doors and they were both jammed. What about the mutants?”

“Come again?” Tiberius asks.

“There were mutants at our school, coordinating the zombies, directing them.”

“Bull,” he snorts.

“No, I’d seen a couple of them before. Ugly mothers with gray hair and yellow eyes. They all wear hoodies.”

“You’re dreaming,” Tiberius insists.

“I’m dead,” I snap. “We don’t dream.”

Tiberius clicks his tongue against his teeth. “So, what, you’re saying the attacks were deliberate? That we were targeted?”

“I dunno,” I shrug. “I’m just telling you what I saw.”