Zom-B Underground Read online

  “Just don’t bite,” Reilly warned me. “If you nip him and turn him into one of your lot, you’ll be put down like a rabid dog, no excuses.”

  The medic wiped sweat from his forehead and I realized he was more nervous than I was. He was wearing thick gloves, but as I’d seen in the room when the woman bit the tall guy in leathers, clothes and gloves aren’t foolproof against a zombie attack.

  I tried to control myself after that, and didn’t pull back as much as I had been doing, even though every part of me wanted to.

  The medic left once he’d finished. I ran my tongue around my mouth and winced as one of my teeth nicked it.

  “I should have warned you about that,” Reilly said. “Doesn’t matter how much you file them down, they’ll always be sharper than they were. Best thing is to keep your tongue clear of your teeth.”

  “Thash eashy fuhr you tuh shay,” I mumbled.

  “Hey, not bad for your first attempt,” Reilly said, looking impressed. “Most of the revitalizeds take a few days to get their act together. I think you’re going to be a fast learner.”

  “Shkroo you, arsh hohl,” I spat, and his expression darkened.

  “Maybe you were better off mute,” he growled.

  It took me a while to get the hang of my new teeth. I still slur the occasional word, but a week into my new life–or unlife, or whatever the hell it’s called–I can speak as clearly as I could before I was killed.

  “B Smith went to mow, went to mow a meadow,” I sing tunelessly to my reflection. “But a zombie ripped her heart out, so now she’s a walking dead-o.”

  Hey, I might be dead, but you’ve gotta laugh, haven’t you? Especially when you’re no longer able to cry your bloody eyes out.

  THREE

  Lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Mum and Dad.

  Reilly hasn’t told me anything about the outside world. We’ve spent a lot of time together. He chats with me about all sorts of things, soccer, TV shows we used to watch, our lives before the zombie uprising. But he won’t discuss the attack on my school or any of the other assaults that took place that day. I’ve no idea if order has been restored or if the soldiers and medics here are the only people left alive in the whole wide world. I’ve pushed him hard for answers, but although Reilly’s been good to me, he can play deaf and dumb to perfection when he wants.

  I’ve said a few prayers for Mum and Dad, even though I’m not the praying type. For Mum especially. It’s strange. I thought I loved Dad more. He was the one I respected, the one I wanted to impress. Mum was weak in my opinion, a coward and a fool for letting her husband knock her about the place. I stood up for her and always tried to help when he’d lay into her, because that’s what you do for your mum, but if you’d ask me to name a favorite, I’d have chosen Dad, despite all his flaws.

  But she’s the one I miss most. Maybe it’s because of what Dad did the day I died. He came to rescue me. Risked his own life to try to save me. But then he made me throw Tyler to the zombies, turned me into a killer, and since then…

  No. That’s a lie, and I don’t want to lie to myself anymore. I’ve done too much of that in the past. Be truthful, B. Dad didn’t force me. I threw Tyler to the zombies because I was scared and it was the easy thing to do.

  Dad hated foreigners and people who had different beliefs. I never wanted to be like him in that respect, but to keep him quiet I acted as if I was, and in the end it rubbed off on me. I became a monster. I don’t ever want to allow that to happen again, but if I’m to keep the beast inside me under control, I have to accept that the guilt was mine for doing what Dad told me to do. You can’t blame other people for sins of your own making.

  I sit up, swing my legs off the bed and scowl. No use worrying about Mum and Dad until I have more information. I’m sure answers will be revealed in time. They can’t be keeping me alive just to hold me in this cell forever. I have to be patient. Explanations will come. If I have to mourn, I’ll do it once their deaths are confirmed. Until then I need to hope for the best.

  To distract myself, I focus on the throbbing noise. It’s constant, the rumbling of machines in the distance, AC, oxygen being pumped in for the living. It never ceases. It drove me mad for the first few days, but now I find it comforting. Without a TV, iPod, or anything else, it’s the only way I have of amusing myself when Reilly’s not around. I tune into the hum when I’m bored and try to put images to the noises, to imagine what’s happening outside this cell, soldiers marching, medics conducting their experiments, the teenagers in leather….

  Hmm. I’ve no idea who they were. I’m pretty sure, judging by the green moss on the tall guy’s cheek, that they’re like me, zombies who can think and act the way they did before they died. Reilly refers to us as revitalizeds. The ordinary, mindless zombies are reviveds. But why were the revitalizeds in that room with weapons? Are they prisoners like me, or are they cooperating with the soldiers? Where did they come from? Why are they–we–different from the others? Is there hope for us? Can we be cured?

  I sneer at that last question. “Of course you can’t be cured, you dumb bitch,” I snort. “Not unless you can find the Wizard of Oz to give you a brand-new heart.”

  I get up and stand in front of the mirror. I seem to be studying myself a lot recently. It’s not that I’m vain. There just isn’t anything else to do. But I’m not interested in my face this time. I was wearing the shredded, filthy remains of my school uniform when I regained consciousness. That’s been replaced with a pair of jeans and a plain white T-shirt.

  I pull the T-shirt up to my chin and stare at my ruined chest. I never had big tits. Vinyl used to call them bee stings. I told him I’d do worse than sting him if he kept on saying that, but I liked Vinyl, so I let him get away with it.

  My right boob is the same as it was before. But my left is missing, torn from my chest by Tyler Bayor. A fair bit of the flesh around it is missing too. And my heart’s been ripped out, leaving an unnatural, grisly hole in its place.

  Bits of bone poke through the flesh around the hole, and I can see all sorts of tubes inside, veins, arteries and what-have-you. Congealed blood meshes the mess together, along with the green moss that sprouts lightly all over the wound. Every so often a few drops of blood ooze out of one of the tubes. But it’s not like it used to be. This blood is much thicker, the consistency of jelly, and the flow always stops after a second or two.

  I quizzed Reilly about that. Without a heart, there shouldn’t be any flow at all. The same way that, without working lungs, I shouldn’t be able to speak.

  “The body remembers,” he said. “At least it does in revitalizeds.”

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

  “When you recovered your wits, your brain started trying to control the rest of your body, the way it did when you were alive,” he explained. “You don’t need to breathe anymore, but your brain thinks that you should, so it forces your lungs to expand and collapse, which is why you can talk. You can stop it when you focus–if you shut your mouth and close your nose, your lungs will shut down after a minute or two–but most of the time your lungs work away in the background, even though there’s no reason why they should.

  “If you had a heart, it would be the same. Your brain would tell it to pump blood around your body. It wouldn’t operate as smoothly as it did before–no more than a weak pulse every few minutes–but it would keep the blood circulating, albeit sluggishly.

  “Now, you don’t have a heart,” Reilly said unsympathetically, “but the brain’s a stubborn organ and it’s doing the best it can. It’s roped in some of your other organs and is using them to nudge your veins and arteries, to compensate for the missing pump. Some of the scientists here are blown away by that. They’ve never seen a body do it before. They think you’re the coolest thing since sliced bread. They’d love to take you off to their labs to study you in depth.”

  “Who’s stopping them?” I asked, but at that the soldier clammed up ag
ain.

  I’ve poked my finger into the cavity in my chest a few times, dipped it in the blood and smeared it across my tongue. But I can’t tell if it tastes any different. My taste buds have gone to hell. My mouth is dry–my tongue feels like it’s made of sandpaper–and apart from a foul staleness that is always there, I haven’t been able to identify any specific tastes.

  I sigh as I stare at the hole. It shocked me the first few times. I couldn’t believe that was really me. I turned my back on the image and tried to cry. Shook my head and refused to accept that this was what I’d become. But now it doesn’t bother me that much. I don’t let it. Why should I? After all…

  “Heh,” I laugh humorlessly at my reflection.

  … life’s too short!

  FOUR

  Reilly comes in with a bowl. “Grub’s up,” he says cheerfully, kicking the door closed behind him. I’m standing in one of the corners when he enters, so I spot the armed soldiers outside the door as it slides shut. Reilly must have been coming to see me daily for at least two weeks, usually twice a day, but they never take chances. He always has backup in case I make a break for freedom. The soldiers outside couldn’t save him if I decided to bite or give him a playful scratch, but they can make sure I don’t get more than a couple of steps outside the cell.

  “What’s on the menu today?” I ask sarcastically.

  “Lamb chops.”

  “Really?” I gasp.

  “No, you idiot,” he grunts, and hands the bowl to me.

  I stare at lumps of cold gray meat in a jellyish substance. It’s the same thing he’s given me every day.

  “I’m sick of this,” I mutter.

  “You will be in a minute,” he laughs, then scratches his head. “What difference does it make? You can’t taste anything anyway.”

  “It has no substance,” I sniff. “I might not be able to taste it, but I can feel it as I grind it up, and it feels like frogspawn.”

  Reilly winks. “Maybe it is.”

  He’s never told me what the meat is, just that it’s laced with chemicals that will help me adjust.

  “What would happen if I refused to eat it?” I ask.

  Reilly shrugs. “You’d go hungry.”

  “So? It’s not like I’m a growing girl, is it?”

  “Trust me,” Reilly says, “you don’t want to go hungry. The dead feel hunger even worse than the living. Makes sense when you think about it. If you’re alive and you starve, eventually you die and that’s the end of your suffering. But if you’re dead already, the pain goes on and on and on.”

  “Do you feed the reviveds too?” I ask.

  “Just eat up, B. I don’t have all day.”

  I know from experience that Reilly doesn’t care whether I eat the gloop or not. I threw it back at him one day, to see how he’d react, if he’d try to force me to eat. He just shrugged, turned round, exited and let me go without.

  I pick up the spoon at the side of the bowl and dip in. It took a while to get the hang of my new fingers. At first I tried picking up things with the bones sticking out of them. But I soon realized that I could grip like I did before, by using the remains of the flesh beneath the tips of my fingers. The bones aren’t as much of an inconvenience as I thought they’d be. The only thing I can’t do is close my hands into proper fists–the bones dig into my palms–but I can keep the fingers flat and bend them down until they touch my palms, and that’s almost the same.

  “What’s happening in the world today?” I ask around spoonfuls of the cold, oily, slimy gruel. “Anything exciting?”

  “Same as yesterday and the day before,” Reilly answers glibly.

  “What about the soccer? Do the zombies have a team in the Premier League?”

  Reilly laughs. “I’d like to see that. Undead United!”

  I grin and carry on eating. Reilly’s all right as prison warders go. I don’t trust him and I’m sure he’d fire a bullet through my head without a moment’s hesitation if ordered. A day might come when we have to lock horns, and maybe one of us won’t walk away from that clash. But he’s treating me as humanely as he can–more than I probably would if our roles were reversed–and I appreciate that.

  I spoon the last of the food into my mouth, chew a few times and swallow. “All done, boss.”

  “Like I give a damn,” he says, taking the bowl from me. He crosses to the sink and picks up the bucket beneath it. Water was supplied to the taps once Reilly had warned me not to drink any of it, just use it for washing, and the bucket was put in place before he brought my first meal.

  “Give me a minute,” I grumble sourly. “I want to savor the moment.”

  I can no longer process food or drink the normal way. Reilly says it would sit in my guts, turn putrid and decay, unaided by any digestive juices. The bits that broke down into liquids would flow through me and dribble out, meaning I’d have to wear a diaper. The solids would stay inside me indefinitely. If I ate enough, they’d back up in my stomach and throat.

  “Would that harm me?” I asked Reilly once.

  “No,” he said. “But maggots and worms would thrive on the refuse and insects would be attracted to it. You’d become a warren for creepy crawlies and they’d chew through you. They couldn’t do any real damage unless they got into your brain and destroyed enough of it to kill you, but would you want to live like that?”

  The image of insects burrowing through my flesh made me shiver so much that, if I hadn’t been dead already, I would have sworn that somebody had walked over my grave.

  I can safely eat the specially prepared food that Reilly gives me, but I can’t keep the bulk of it down. According to Reilly, when the scientists first started to experiment, they used intravenous tubes to feed nutrients to the zombies. He said that’s still the best way, but since most people prefer to eat, the good folk in the labs came up with a way for us to act as if we were still capable of enjoying a meal. The gray crud is designed to release nutrients into our clogged-up bloodstream almost instantly. But we have to get rid of the rest by ourselves.

  “Come on,” Reilly says, tapping a foot. “You’re not the only one I have to deal with.”

  “I won’t do it until you tell me how many others you look after.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” Reilly says, turning away. “You’re the one who has to live with the stink and insects.”

  “Wait,” I stop him. Pulling a face, I lean over the bucket and stick a finger down my throat, careful not to tear the soft lining. The gray stuff comes surging back up and I vomit into the bucket, shuddering as I spit the last dregs from my lips.

  “Not very ladylike, is it?” I grunt as I pass the bucket to a smiling Reilly.

  “I don’t think you were ever in danger of being mistaken for a lady,” he says, “even when you were one of the living.”

  “I could sue you for saying that sort of thing to me,” I huff.

  “Lawyers don’t represent corpses,” he smirks.

  I snarl at the grinning soldier and gnash my teeth warningly, but Reilly knows I’m not dumb enough to bite him. One of the first things he told me was that I can still be decommissioned, even though I’m already dead. As I already knew, zombies need their brains to function.

  Even if they didn’t want to kill me, they could punish me in other ways. I don’t feel as much pain as I used to, but I’m not completely desensitized. I dug one of my finger bones into my flesh, to test myself, and it hurt. When I pushed even farther, it hurt like hell. The dead can be tortured too.

  “By the way,” Reilly says just before he exits. “You’ll be entertaining a couple of visitors shortly, so be on your best behavior.”

  “Who’s coming?” I snap, thinking for a second that it’s Mum and Dad, torn between delight and terror at the thought. Part of me doesn’t want them to see me like this. If they’re alive, that part would rather they believed I was dead.

  “You keep asking questions,” Reilly says. “About the attacks, revitalizeds, why you’re different
to reviveds, how you wound up here. These people can give you some answers.”

  “Reilly!” I shout as he steps outside. “Don’t leave me hanging like that. Tell me who…”

  But the door has already closed. I’m locked in, alone and ignorant, as I have been for most of my incarceration.

  But not for much longer if Reilly’s to be believed.

  FIVE

  The visitors are a doctor and a soldier.

  The doctor is a thin, balding man with a carefully maintained pencil mustache. He squints a lot, like someone who needs glasses but refuses to admit it. He didn’t tell me his name when he entered, or even acknowledge my presence. He just stood with his hands crossed in front of him until a table and chair were put in place, then sat and said stiffly, “I am Dr. Cerveris.”

  The soldier is friendlier. He brought in the table, set it down, then went out to fetch the chairs. He also brought through a mobile TV and DVD player. At first I thought he was a regular soldier, but when he sat down with the doctor and nodded to let him know it was time to begin, I realized he must be someone important.

  “I’m Josh Massoglia,” he introduced himself, smiling widely. “But you can stick with Josh. Everybody else does. No one can pronounce my surname. I even struggle with it myself sometimes.”

  Josh laughed and I smiled. He’s a good-looking guy, in a rugged kind of way. Hard to tell what color his hair is, since it’s shaved down to the roots. He wears a plain green sweater over his shirt and acts like he’s just one of the guys, but he has an air of authority. Dr. Cerveris is snooty, like someone who thinks he’s a VIP. Josh is more laid-back, so comfortable with his power that he doesn’t feel like he needs to prove anything.

  The doctor pulls on a pair of thick plastic gloves and asks if he can examine me. I stand still while he prods and probes my fingers and face. I hesitate when he asks me to take off my T-shirt. Josh grins and turns away. I still feel awkward–I never liked undressing in front of doctors or nurses–but I disrobe as requested.