Zom-B Gladiator Read online

  ‘That’ll teach you to mess with the Clay.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ I shout at Reilly. He’s patting himself, checking for rips in his leathers, features twisted frantically behind the visor. ‘Reilly! Are you OK?’

  ‘I think so,’ he wheezes, starting to relax. ‘I don’t think I’ve been scratched. Where the hell is Jakob?’

  ‘Helping Shane.’

  Reilly growls. ‘My boot’s gonna be helping its way up his arse when I get him back to County Hall.’

  ‘No swearing,’ Rage crows as he grabs the head of a boy who can’t be more than eight or nine years old. ‘You’ll set a bad example.’

  ‘A lot of use you were,’ I throw back at him.

  Rage shrugs. ‘Doesn’t matter to me if Reilly gets turned. Just another monster for us to kill. The more the merrier as far as I’m concerned.’

  I curse Rage, not for the first time, and stride towards him. ‘Let the kid go,’ I tell him, before he crushes the boy’s skull.

  ‘Why?’ he laughs. ‘Do you want to fight me?’

  ‘No. But you know the rules—we need to check kids out before we destroy them.’

  Rage scowls. ‘I hate rules.’

  ‘Tough. If you don’t obey them, I’ll tell Dr Oystein and we’ll see how welcome you are at County Hall then.’

  Rage mumbles something to himself, then lets the boy go. The kid immediately sets after Reilly, every bit as anxious to sink his fangs into a living human’s brain as the adults are. I tackle him and easily stop his charge. I pull out the cuffs which I’ve brought along especially for this and slip a pair on to his wrists. Letting go, I push him to the ground, then snap another pair shut around his ankles. As the boy struggles furiously to break free, mewling miserably, I assess the situation.

  Shane is back in the thick of things. He looks ashamed and so he should. A sheepish Jakob has resumed his position and is protecting Reilly again. Ashtat and Rage are picking off the last few adult reviveds. Carl has cuffed a girl even younger than the boy and is moving in on the last remaining child, another boy, this one not far off my age.

  It’s plain sailing now.

  A minute later every zombie has been dispatched except for the three kids. As the rest of the Angels brush themselves down and give each other high-fives, I examine the cuffed prisoners, searching their thighs and arms for c-shaped scars. Dr Oystein spent decades injecting children with a vaccine which would help them fight the zombie gene if infected. If we find any child with the mark, we take them back to County Hall in case they revitalise further down the line.

  Sadly, none of these three bears the scar of hope. They’re regular reviveds, damned from the moment they were turned. I steel myself, offer up a quick prayer, then finish them off one by one. I feel sick every time I do this. I know they’re undead killers, no different to any of the adult zombies that I’ve put out of their misery, but it still feels wrong.

  I could ask one of the others to do it – Rage has no qualms about ripping the brain from a young zombie’s head – but this is a hard world and Master Zhang has warned us that each one of us needs to toughen up if we’re going to thrive and be of use to Dr Oystein. So I grit my teeth and force myself to push through with the dirty deed. I just hope, if God is watching, that He understands and forgives me, though I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive myself.

  ‘Nice work,’ Rage says when I’m done. He offers me his hand to high-five but I ignore him.

  ‘I’m going to take that chain and help Reilly shove it up your arse,’ I bark at Shane.

  ‘I screwed up,’ he winces. ‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. But my dad gave me that chain. It’s all I have left of either of my parents.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Rage snorts. ‘I saw you take it from a shop last week.’

  The pair burst out laughing. ‘You shouldn’t have told her,’ Shane giggles as I glower at him. ‘I had her going. She’d have melted and pardoned me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have,’ Reilly snarls, removing his helmet. ‘My bloody life was on the line. I haven’t been vaccinated. There’s no coming back for me if I get turned. You risked my safety over a bloody chain that you can replace any time?’

  Shane’s smile fades. ‘I really did screw up. I lost my head for a minute. I’m sorry, Reilly, honestly I am.’

  ‘You’d better be,’ Reilly says stiffly. ‘And note this, you little thug—if anything like that happens again, I’ll kill you. Even if I get bitten or scratched, I’ll make it my job to stab you through the brain before I turn. Understand?’

  Shane nods and averts his gaze.

  ‘Apart from that, we did brilliantly,’ Rage cheers, clapping loudly. ‘Now let’s go tell Master Zhang how we fared and ask Ciara to rustle us up some delicious brain stew. I don’t know about you guys, but killing always makes me hungry.’

  Rage licks his lips, the others laugh and cheer, then we trudge back to County Hall, experiment concluded, skills honed, one step closer to our hellish graduation.

  We report back to Master Zhang, who’s waiting for us in one of the rooms where he trains his recruits. He’s angry when he hears what Shane and Jakob did. He’s always stressing the need to focus and obey a direct order.

  ‘No rest tonight,’ he snaps at them. ‘I want to see both of you here at lights out. I will work you through the night and it will not be a workout that you forget in a hurry.’

  Shane pulls a face but Jakob only nods glumly.

  ‘What about the others?’ Zhang asks Reilly. ‘Did they perform to your satisfaction?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t have any complaints. They looked sharp.’

  Our mentor sniffs, then waves us away. Shane hesitates. ‘Master, I don’t want to make a big deal of it, but I was injured. I think I might need a spell in a Groove Tube.’

  ‘Let me see.’ Zhang examines Shane’s stomach and shoulder. The shoulder’s no biggie, but the zombie dug quite deeply into the lining of his stomach. No guts are oozing out but it’s bloody down there. ‘Does it hurt?’ Zhang asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Shane says.

  ‘Good.’ Zhang pokes one of the wounds and Shane cries out and doubles over. ‘You will avoid the Groove Tubes. You will suffer your injuries and learn from the pain. Understand?’

  ‘Yes . . . Master,’ Shane wheezes.

  ‘Now get out of here, all of you,’ Zhang says. ‘I am expecting another group for training soon, and hopefully they will pay more attention to my instructions than you.’

  We bow and take our leave. Shane limps along, gingerly massaging the flesh around his stomach. ‘I bet the cuts get infected,’ he mutters.

  ‘It will serve you right if they do,’ Ashtat says. ‘You let us down and put Reilly’s life in danger.’

  ‘What about cancer boy?’ Shane snaps. ‘Jakob screwed up too.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ashtat says. ‘But he screwed up trying to save a friend’s life, not because he was worried about what would happen to an item of cheap jewellery.’

  Shane glares at Ashtat and starts to retort.

  ‘Leave it, big boy,’ Rage chuckles, slapping Shane’s back. ‘They’re right, you’re wrong. Live with it, get over it, move on. Now, who’s coming with me to get some stew?’

  Everyone says they’ll tag along with Rage, except me.

  ‘I’m heading back to our room,’ I tell them.

  ‘Don’t be a killjoy,’ Carl frowns. ‘Come with us. We did well in there apart from a couple of hiccups. Join the celebrations.’

  ‘No, you’re all right, I’m fine.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Carl says, irritated. They head off in search of Ciara, a close, united pack of friends. I stare after them longingly, wishing I could belong, but at the same time knowing why I keep myself separate.

  It’s been a month since Dr Oystein fished me out of the Groove Tube after my fall from the London Eye and my run-in with the inhuman baby. When I’d dried off and he’d filed down my fangs and pumped my insides clean, I told him about my adve
ntures, the monstrous baby and the dreams I’d had when I was alive of creatures just like it.

  Dr Oystein is always hard to read, but my description of the baby didn’t seem to come as a great shock. I think he already knew about the existence of such beings. My dreams, on the other hand, disturbed and intrigued him in equal measure. He made me recount them as clearly as I could.

  ‘You are sure the babies in your nightmares were exactly the same as this one?’ he asked. ‘You are not imagining the similarity?’

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I had the dreams all of my life, as far back as I can recall, until I was killed and stopped sleeping. I’m sure this baby was the same, not just because of the way it looked, but how it spoke and what it said.’

  I told the doc how Owl Man had asked about my dreams when he came to visit me before the zombie uprising. That troubled him even more.

  ‘I did not know that you had seen our owl-eyed associate before your encounter in Trafalgar Square,’ he murmured.

  I shrugged. ‘I never thought to mention that. It didn’t seem important. Do you know who he is?’

  The doc nodded.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘That is irrelevant.’ He smiled. ‘I actually prefer Owl Man—it suits him better. That is how I will refer to him from now on.’

  I wanted to learn more about Owl Man and the babies, but Dr Oystein said it was not yet time.

  ‘Please be patient. I will share all the information that I possess with you, as I vowed when you first came here, but you must trust me to fill in the blanks as I see fit. I want to think about this first, what the nightmares might signify, how they link in with everything else.’

  I told him I thought that the dreams had been sent to me by some higher force, so I’d see there were hidden, inexplicable depths to the world, and be more inclined to believe that the doc was telling me the truth when I came here.

  ‘If that is the case,’ Dr Oystein said softly, ‘there is more to you than I first suspected. None of the other Angels had such dreams when they were alive. If God shared a premonition with you, there must be a reason for it. Perhaps you have a crucial role to play in the war with Mr Dowling.’

  ‘Is that a good thing?’ I asked.

  He made a low, rumbling noise. ‘I cannot say for sure. I know only that such responsibility is a frightening prospect. I have had to deal with it for decades. I do not wish to scare you, but I have to say that I would not wish such a burden on anyone.’

  Then he kissed my forehead tenderly and sent me back to my room, telling me that he would consider what I’d told him and do all that he could to help me comprehend my path and steer me along it as best he could.

  I return to my room, change clothes, then scan the books on my shelves. I don’t have a lot of stuff. Spare clothes, an iPod, some video games, a few nice watches and the books. I don’t feel the need to cram my share of the room with personal items. London is an open city these days. Any time I want anything, I can simply go out and find it.

  The others are the same. Nobody has bothered to clutter up their shelves or store goods in the many niches of County Hall. Carl has lots of fancy gear because he’s into fashion, Shane has stacks of gold chains because he thinks they’re cool, and Ashtat has hundreds of boxes of matches which she uses to make her brilliantly detailed models—she’s currently working on one of Canary Wharf, her most ambitious project yet. Jakob has virtually nothing apart from some small photos of his family which he found in his mother’s purse after she’d been killed along with his dad and sister.

  My books are all about art and sculpture. If you’d told me when I was alive that I’d one day be an avid reader of such volumes, I’d have sneered. But time drags here. It’s fine when we’re training or on a mission, but otherwise we’re stuck inside, staring at the walls.

  The others play games and watch movies, but I’ve been keeping myself distant from my fellow Angels. Films don’t hold the same appeal for me as they used to. Video games are the same. I haven’t ditched them completely, but I can’t spend a lot of time on them. I still listen to music, but my ears are so sensitive that I have to play the songs low, and where’s the fun in that?

  Art, on the other hand, has started to appeal to me. Mum was big into art and often tried to pass on her love of it to me. I resisted, in large part because I knew that Dad was scornful of it. He thought artists were pretentious wasters and I didn’t want him looking down his nose at me.

  My encounters with Timothy Jackson changed my view. His drawings of zombies fascinated me and I found myself thinking about them, the styles he had adopted, how they worked in different ways. I studied his paintings for a long time, then visited a few galleries to compare them with the work of other artists.

  I started looking through the books in gallery shops. I wouldn’t have dared go into such places in the old days. I’d have been afraid that the staff would laugh at me, or think I was just there to steal. But now there are only zombies to bear witness, and they couldn’t care less about idle browsers.

  I hadn’t planned to read any of the books in detail, but the more I learnt, the more I could appreciate the pictures in them, as well as those hanging on the walls of the galleries. I lugged a couple of art books back to flick through, and soon my shelves started to fill up. There’s no problem finding new volumes—here are loads of shops in London and they’re open for business twenty-four hours a day, no credit card or cash required, and only the odd zombie bookseller or two to contend with.

  Dr Oystein likes us to rest at night, to lie in our beds and act as if we’re asleep. I read during that time, rather than just lie in the dark and count the seconds as they slowly tick by. No complaints from the others about my reading light—a few of them read as well, or play hand-held video games.

  I used to be a slow reader but I’ve been speeding up recently. In the beginning I tended to choose books with lots of pictures in them, but now I’ve moved on to thick textbooks. I don’t finish everything that I start, but when a book grabs my interest, I can plough through it pretty niftily.

  So what am I in the mood for today? I study the titles, pick up a few, read the blurb on the back covers, then replace them. Until I come to The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. I don’t recall bringing this back, and it’s a monster, so I’m sure I would have remembered. Frowning, I slide it free of the books around it and a note falls out. It’s from Carl.

  I saw you reading a book about Van Gogh. My dad had a copy of this in his library and often raved about it. I thought you might like to give it a go. Let me know if it’s any good and I might try it myself.

  I scowl at the note. I don’t like it when people do nice things for me. I never know how to react. I suppose I’ll have to thank Carl now—if I don’t, I’ll look like a mean-spirited cow. Why couldn’t he have just told me about the book and let me find it for myself? Bloody do-gooder.

  I think about dumping the book in the bin, but that would make me look childish and ungrateful. Besides, Van Gogh is one of my favourite artists and it sounds like a good read. Grumbling softly, I head to bed and settle down for a few hours of solitary reading.

  I quickly get into the letters and time flies by. Carl has picked a winner. On the one hand that annoys me, because it means I won’t be able to jeer at him for giving me a piece of crap to read. But on the other hand I’m delighted to have discovered a brilliant new book, and I soon forget about Carl and having to say thank you and everything else.

  A soft voice brings me back to the real world. ‘I never thought I’d see B Smith lost in a book.’

  I jump slightly – I had no idea that anyone had entered the room – and glance up. It’s my old teacher, Mr Burke, standing in the doorway, beaming at me. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for nutters who cut their ears off,’ I growl, carefully closing the book and setting it aside. ‘Besides, this is a great read. I might have studied harder if I’d been pushed towards these sorts of books in school.’

  �
��No,’ Burke laughs. ‘You wouldn’t have given it a chance. You were a busy girl, so many slacker friends, so many things not to do with them. They wouldn’t have been impressed if you’d started reading books instead of hanging out with them on street corners.’

  Burke crosses the room, picks up the book and flicks through it. He looks much older than he did in school, bags under his eyes, hair almost completely grey now. I never had a crush on Burke, but as teachers went, he was a bit of all right. Now he looks like a broken old man.

  ‘I always meant to give this a try,’ Burke says.

  ‘You’d heard about it?’

  ‘Yes. I was never much of an art buff. Biographies were my poison. Seven Pillars of Wisdom—now that was a book. But Van Gogh’s letters were famous. I don’t suppose I’ll get time to read them now. I can’t stay up all night like some undead people I can name.’

  ‘I could always bite you,’ I joke. ‘Get Dr Oystein to vaccinate you first. You might turn into one of us. Then you can stay up as late as you like.’

  ‘I’ve already been vaccinated,’ Burke says, sitting on the bed next to mine, the one Jakob sleeps in.

  ‘You have?’ I sit upright and stare at him.

  ‘I asked Dr Oystein to give me the shot not long after I started working for him.’

  ‘Why?’ I cry. ‘You know what it means, don’t you? Unless you get infected, the vaccine will attack your system and melt you down. You’ll be dead within the next ten or fifteen years.’

  Burke shrugs. ‘It’s unlikely I’ll last that long. There’s a far greater probability that I’ll be snagged by a zombie. If they don’t eat my brain and I turn, I’d like the chance to revitalise. I know most adults don’t, but still, better some hope than none at all.’

  I shake my head. ‘And what if you don’t get bitten or scratched?’

  Burke smiles. ‘Then I’ll miss out on old age. I wasn’t looking forward to it anyway. I’d rather go in my prime, young, virile and full of life.’