Zom-B Underground (9 page)

“No,” I scowl. “I understand why you have to stop them, why you lock them up, even why you execute them. But there must be other ways to experiment on them.” I look pleadingly to Burke. “There
must
be.”

“Of course there are,” Burke says.

“Billy…” Josh growls.

Burke waves away the soldier’s objection. “She’s not a fool. You’re right, B. It
is
cruel. It’s inhuman. On a moral level it’s unpardonable.” He shrugs wearily. “But we’re at war. That’s not a great excuse, I know. I certainly wouldn’t have let my students get away with it in class if they’d tried to use that argument to justify war crimes. But this is where we’re at. I don’t call the shots and I don’t have the right to pass judgment. So I do what I can to help, even if it means going against everything I once believed in.” He nods at Josh and Dr. Cerveris. “These gentlemen would appreciate it if you would too.”

I shift uncomfortably. “It’s wrong.”

“Yes,” Burke says. “But we’re asking you to cooperate regardless.”

“You were better than that once,” I whisper.

Burke winces, looks away shamefully, doesn’t respond.

“A racist zombie taking the moral high ground,” Dr. Cerveris jeers.

“She’s not a zombie,” Burke snaps.

“Thanks to you,” Josh says softly.

I frown. “What does that mean?”

Burke is looking at Josh, surprised. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to mention that.”

“You weren’t,” Josh says. “But if we tell her, maybe we can get through to her….”

Burke chuckles cynically. “When all else fails, try the truth.” He winks at me. “We don’t know why certain zombies revitalize. It’s a mystery. Based on all the studies we’ve conducted, it shouldn’t happen. The dead lose their senses. Their brains shut down and all traces of their old selves are lost. In damn near all of them, that loss is permanent, no way back.

“But a few of you defy the laws. You recover consciousness and carry on as you did when you were alive, for however long your bodies hold up.”

“Any idea how long that might be?” I interrupt.

Burke checks with Josh, who frowns, then shrugs. “Why not?” he says with just a hint of dark relish.

“We think–” Burke begins.

“It’s an imprecise science,” Dr. Cerveris cuts in coolly. “We have little evidence to back up our theories. But judging by what we’ve seen, and forecasting as accurately as we can, we anticipate an eighteen- to twenty-four-month life cycle for revitalized specimens.”

“You mean I’ll shut down and die for real within a couple of years?” I gasp.

“Maybe as little as a year,” Josh says. “You’ve been with us for more than six months already, remember.”

“But the revitalization process only kicked in a matter of weeks ago,” Dr. Cerveris reminds him. “We’re not sure if the time before that counts or not.”

“Wait a minute,” I snap. “Are you saying that all of the zombies will be wiped out within the next two years?”

“Sadly, no,” Dr. Cerveris replies. “Only the revitalizeds. The brains of the reviveds are stable, and from what we’ve seen, will remain so, at least in the near future. But when consciousness returns, the brain starts to operate differently. It conflicts with the demands of its undead body and begins to decompose. Unless we can find a way to counteract that–and so far we haven’t had much opportunity to study the phenomenon–the prognosis is grim.”

“So I’ve a couple of years max,” I sigh.

“If they’re right,” Burke says. “They might not be.”

“But we usually are,” Dr. Cerveris smirks.

“That’s not your main worry, though,” Burke says.

I raise an eyebrow. “There’s worse than being told I’ll be worm fodder in a couple of years?”

Burke nods solemnly. “The first revitalizeds didn’t last long. They were isolated once their guards noticed the change in them, but after a week or so, they reverted. Their brains flatlined and they went back to being mindless zombies. No one has ever recovered their mental faculties a second time.”

“What changed?” I murmur.

“We found a way to prolong the revitalization,” Dr. Cerveris says proudly.

“How?”

“Nutrients.”

“You mean the gruel you’ve been feeding us keeps our brains going?”

“Yes. Without it, you would deteriorate rapidly.”

I stare at the doctor, then Burke. “For a bunch of quacks who don’t know why the dead reanimate or how some of us regain our senses, they seem to have figured out that part pretty quickly.”

Burke smiles. “Good, B. You’re thinking clearly, looking for answers behind the half-truths and lies. Go on. Take it further.”

“I don’t know if we need to tell her that much,” Josh intercedes.

“We’ve guided her this far,” Burke counters. “There’s no harm in letting her go all the way.”

I try to make sense of what I’ve been told, but I run into a brick wall. “It’s no good,” I tell Burke. “I don’t know what you want me to work out.”

“Think,” Burke groans. “What’s the one thing that zombies everywhere–from those you’ve seen in movies to those you saw at the school–go wild for? If you had a zombie locked up, and it was bellowing and wailing, how would you calm it down?”

“I don’t…”

I stop, flashing on an image of the video footage that Josh showed me, of me bent over a boy, digging around inside his skull. In all the films I saw, all the comics I read, I never came across a zombie who didn’t hunger for the juicy gray matter common to
humans everywhere. The kind of gray matter, I realize with a sick jolt, that Reilly has been serving me every day.

Burke sees that I’m up to speed. He grins humorlessly, then says without emotion, “They’ve been feeding you human brains to keep you conscious. You need them to survive.”

“So tell us again,” Dr. Cerveris says smugly as I stare at them with revulsion and horror. “
Who’s
the monster here?”

There’s a long silence while I come to terms with what I’ve been told. This is certainly a meeting to remember. It’s not every day that you find out you’ve got less than two years to live, and by the way, you’ve been feasting on human brains for the past month. But after my initial shock it doesn’t take me long to get a handle on myself.

“Where do the brains come from?” I ask.

Burke says, “I told you—humans.”

“I mean, are you killing people in order to feed us?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dr. Cerveris snorts.

“The casualties have been horrendous,” Josh explains. “We can’t put an exact figure
on how many people have been slaughtered, but in London alone we reckon it must run into the millions.”

“That’s not including the hundreds of thousands who have been turned,” Dr. Cerveris points out. “Just those who were killed, whose heads were cracked open, so that they couldn’t revive.”

“We’ve mopped up a lot of the corpses,” Josh continues. “Reviveds rarely clean out a skull—they almost always leave bits of brain behind. Ever since we realized what revitalizeds need, we’ve been collecting brain matter and storing it.”

There’s silence again. I stare at the wall above Burke’s head. This wasn’t how I saw my life going when I was at school. I didn’t have any great career plans, but cannibalism was
very
far down my list of options.

I chuckle drily and lower my gaze. “You know what?” I grin crookedly. “Sod it. I always wanted to go on a TV show and eat things like bugs, snakes, roadkill. This is a dream come true. Bring it on. I’ll eat whatever the hell you chuck at me.” I rub my stomach slowly.
“Yum.”

Burke smirks. “I told them you were a piece of work.” He glances at Josh. “I bet you’re glad now that you listened to me.”

“We’ll see,” Josh mutters. “She hasn’t agreed to cooperate yet.”

I frown, thinking back a few minutes, then turn to Burke. “Josh said it was thanks to you that I wasn’t still a zombie. What did he mean?”

“I was coming to that before you sidetracked me.” Burke crosses his hands on the table and looks at me seriously. “Revitalizeds need
brains to thrive. If we don’t feed them, they regress. In most cases, the staff here let that happen.”

I cock my head sideways. “Come again?”

“The percentage of reviveds who revitalize is minuscule,” Dr. Cerveris says defensively. “But if you take a group of hundreds of thousands, even a fraction of a percent is significant.”

“I figured there must be more of us,” I say slowly, “that adults and younger kids were being held elsewhere.”

“Of course,” Dr. Cerveris says. “We keep a sample of all age groups, races, both sexes.”

“A
sample
,” I repeat, knowing what that must mean but waiting for them to confirm it.

“They let most revitalizeds regress,” Burke says. His gaze hasn’t wavered. “They separate the conscious zombies, hold them in a cell, don’t feed them, then return them to the general holding pens once they’ve–”

“–lost their bloody minds!” I roar. I try to jump to my feet but the chains around my ankles hold me in place.

“There are limits to the numbers we can maintain,” Dr. Cerveris says calmly.

“Bullshit!” I retort. “You just don’t want the hassle.”

“We only need a few to study and help us with our experiments,” Josh says. “What would we gain by keeping the others?”

“They can think!” I scream. “They’re people. They have rights.”

“Rights?”
Josh sneers. “Only the living have rights, and they’re not
alive, not really. You aren’t either. You’re a freak revived, nothing more, a threat to any normal person, never more than a few skipped feeds away from insane savagery. We keep you because we need you, but you have no rights. You lost those when you died and became a killer.”

“Is that how you think too?” I ask Burke, trembling with rage.

“No,” he says. “To me it’s abhorrent.”

“Then how can you work with them?” I snarl. “Why do you put up with this crap? Why not walk away, like anyone halfway human would?”

Burke shakes his head and doesn’t reply.

“I wouldn’t be so quick to criticize your old teacher if I were you,” Dr. Cerveris says smoothly. “You’d be back stewing with the reviveds if it weren’t for Billy Burke.”

“We run a background check on every revitalized,” Josh says. “We like to know who they are, where they came from. We gather as much information as we can before deciding how to process them.”

“I bet that’s so you can give priority to family members or people related to politicians or powerful businessmen,” I sneer.

Josh shrugs. “I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a consideration, but that’s the way the world has always worked. Nepotism is rampant everywhere. But if it’s any consolation, very few revitalizeds fall into that bracket, so it’s rare that someone is sacrificed at the expense of a minister’s son or a billionaire’s daughter.”

“When they ran a check on you,” Burke says, “they discovered your connection to me. I’m a consultant, like I told you. I’ve been
working with the army, helping deal with undead children who are finding it hard to cope. Most are distraught at having lost family and friends. They don’t all adjust as swiftly as you have.”

“More’s the pity,” Dr. Cerveris murmurs. “Our lives would be a lot simpler if every revitalized were as cold and uncaring as Becky Smith.”

I look at the doctor with contempt. “Screw you, numbnuts. I care. You don’t understand me at all, do you?”

“That’s why I’ve been kept busy,” Burke says as Dr. Cerveris scowls at me. “I
do
understand, or at least I have a good idea. I never thought of it as a gift, being able to relate to teenagers, but it seems that talent is rarer than I believed. If it weren’t for me and a few others, you guys would have been branded as cattle and treated the same way.”

“I don’t think we’d have gone quite that far,” Josh smiles frostily. “Anyway, we realized you were one of Billy’s ex-students, so we asked him if he wanted us to approve you for sustained revitalization.”

“And you said yes.” I flash my teeth at Burke in a mock smile. “Thanks. You’re my hero.”

“It wasn’t as simple as that,” Burke says quietly. “I had to pitch for you. I told them you were tough, smart, determined, that you’d be an asset.”

“In short,” Josh snaps, “he told us you’d fit in perfectly with the zom heads, that if we wanted someone to carry out harsh but essential tests on reviveds, you were our girl. That’s why we spared you.
Otherwise…” He puts a finger to the side of his head, twirls it round and makes loony eyes at me.

“Nice to know you think so highly of me,” I snarl at Burke.

“Would you rather I’d let you revert?” he asks gently. “Should I have abandoned you and left you to rot?”

I frown uncertainly. I can see where he’s coming from, but still…

“You had no right to promise on my behalf,” I mutter. “You shouldn’t have told them I’d be willing to torture people–”

“Zombies,” Josh slips in.

“–and kill them,” I finish.

“I know,” Burke says. “But I figured if they kept you alive, at least you’d have the chance to make that decision yourself. You’re faced with a choice, B. It’s not a welcome choice, and I honestly don’t know how I’d react in your place, but it must be better than having no choice at all.”

“And that choice is…?” I challenge him.

“Do what they ask and stay on as a zom head,” he says evenly. “Or refuse to do their bidding and become a senseless zombie again.”

“Not much of a choice, is it?” I huff.

“No,” he admits. “But if you choose to defy them, at least you’ll give up on consciousness willingly. The other way, you’d have simply regressed without any understanding of why it was happening to you.”

“So I can become a vicious mercenary or a brain-dead cannibal. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Boiled down to its basics, yes,” Burke says.

Josh coughs politely. “I don’t see any point in taking this conversation further. You know where you stand, Becky. It’s time to decide. Will you help us or do we send you back to the pens?”

I stare at the three men, thinking hard. I’d like to say it’s an easy choice, but it’s not. I want to do the right thing and toss their offer of cooperation back into their ugly, cynical faces. I want to stand tall and proud like a hero, face true death willingly, without any regrets.