Unfed (2 page)

Before I can answer her, my head starts to spin. Martha is pressing a plunger into the liquid that is going into the back of my hand.

“No! What are you doing?” I scream at her. I feel myself lurch forward, my head seemingly floating behind me while my body is being carried on a roller coaster climbing the steepest track.

“Don’t worry,” she tells me. “It’s for the best.”

The roller coaster peaks and starts the long descent into oblivion.

“No!” I try to yell more forcefully, but it sounds like a woof.

“You’ll be safe,” Martha shouts from somewhere near the door. “I’ll come back for you!”

And with that, I sink.

“Wake up, Roberta.”

Smitty leans in close, and I smell the raspberry shampoo he uses. He kisses me softly on the forehead, his hand warm against my cheek
.

I can’t see him. My eyes are blurred, and I rub at them, but that doesn’t improve matters
.

Oh, knickers. I know why I can’t see. This is a dream
.

“Get up. This is no time to be a-slumbering.” I hear the smile in his voice. “We’re all driving on the road to nowhere, and you’re the only one who’s got a map.”

I crinkle my brow. “Seriously? We’re doing cryptic dream messages now, Smitty?”

He laughs. “Best I can do, Bob. But don’t lay blame for the lame. This is
your
subconscious, after all.”

His hands have slinked underneath my bedsheets, and I can feel skin against my skin. There is soft, warm breath against the back of my neck. The flutter of eyelashes on my bare head
.

Joy fills me. I reach out and touch him. The familiar leather jacket creaks a little as I pull him toward me, relishing the hug. I sense his face moving down to mine. I try to open my eyes to look into his, but they refuse to open. Lips touch; we kiss, deeply. I don’t care about anything anymore, just this kiss. He rolls his body
so that he’s on top of me, and I let him, thrilled and a little scared by his weight. The kiss gets more fervent, more desperate, and I give in to it, a rush of heat pulsating through my body. I reach up to feel his hair, open my mouth, and his tongue pushes against mine. I feel rude. I feel wonderful. I feel happy
.

And then his tongue pushes farther, filling my mouth, and before I know it I’m choking. I can’t breathe, and I’m trying to push him off me, trying to scream, and he’s heavy on me, and he’s crushing my chest, and the hands that were soft and loving a minute ago are clawed and tearing at my flesh
.

My eyes flick open. My hand wrenches a clutch of black hair from a bleached white skull with mad eyes. Gnashing teeth sink into my cheek, and my face explodes with pain
.

He’s Undead. And soon I will be, too
.

*  *  *

The sirens are still screaming as I fall, panting, back into reality, eyes crusted and a dried trail of dribble down one side of my mouth.

Mum
. Mum is dead and I’m having messed-up dirty dreams about Smitty.

I don’t believe she’s dead. I
won’t
believe it. She always has a plan. Dying would not be part of it.

I scrub at my face to wash off the guilt and the beginnings of something that might turn into uncontrollable grief, push myself up, and rip the damn sleepytime tube out of the back of my hand. Rub it better, I’ll mend. Teeth gritted, I swing my legs out from under the sheet, and press my weight down through my feet, gripping with my toes. And then I feel it: a quick sting between my legs.

Oh. My. God.

There’s another tube. And this one is going up somewhere no tube should ever go. My good hand fumbles beneath the sheets, I claw at tape,
and before I can even think about pain and consequence, I’ve yanked the tube out, flinging it away from me like it’s on fire.

Think of Mum. Offset pain with pain
.

Pale yellow liquid seeps from the tube. Horror of horrors. There’s a hanging piss-bag on the side of the bed that is now emptying itself in a creeping puddle on the floor.

Ow, ow, ow
.

This must be the crappiest wake-up ever. And believe me, there have been some crappy ones.

I rescue my bag of belongings before it can get wet, and dress as quickly as I can: underwear, T-shirt and fleece, socks and boots. No legwear; for now I’ll have to have naked pins. I shove my phone into my boot, carefully step around Pee Lake, and tiptoe to the door. I turn the handle, but no dice. It’s locked, of course. Pressing my ear up to the wood I try to hear something. Shouts? Screams? Relieved laughter? But all I can hear is the screech of the sirens.

And then they stop.

I spring away from the door.

Silence.

Now someone will come. Surely. It was all a big mistake, and they’ll come and reassure me.

But they don’t.

The silence is waaay worse.

As I stand there, I notice a clipboard on the locker by the door.
ROBERTA BROOK
is written on the top of a lined sheet, with times and dates and mystery numbers scribbled on each line. I reach for it and scan the notes. Random stuff I can’t possibly hope to understand, not only because it’s medicalese and shorthand, but because I can’t read the handwriting.
That’s not so surprising; Mum is a doctor and her handwriting looks like an indignant hen scratched something in the sand.

Mum
. No, don’t think it.

I make myself read on. Tests? Something-something
virus
? Cold shoots through me. They must think I have it — the Osiris zombie disease. Something about “carrier”? “Indicators” something-something “masked by other factors”? Huh?

“Carrier”? I shake my head slowly. One in a million people are, my mother told me. Folks who carry the virus but don’t go zombie, they don’t turn. My dad was one, a carrier. Kind of didn’t make much diff in the end to him, because he got sick and died before she could save him.

Maybe it runs in the family? How much sense would it make if I was one, too? A whole lot. The thought sends chills through me.

I have to get out of here.

The window. It’s lighter outside now; I wonder how long I was sleeping. I shuffle around the bed and lean over the sill to look.

A butterfly lands on the glass in front of me and flicks its wings prettily.

OK. So, not sure what I expected to see, but it wasn’t this.

It’s a tropical rain forest out there, the air filled with flutter-bys winging from leaf to leaf. I blink and refocus. Through the foliage and insects, I see walls and windows. It’s a courtyard, set into the middle of the building. There are exotic flowers in bloom, little explosions of bright color among the green. Plants with huge, flat leaves. Vines up the walls, curling their way past the windows opposite me — darkened windows that I can’t see into. And in the air, hundreds of butterflies of all sizes and shades. I cling onto the windowsill shakily as I take it all in. Some hospital. You could sell tickets for this.

Thunk
.

The door. I jerk round so quickly, I crick my neck with an
Ow
. Someone’s arrived.

A low groan. A scratching noise.

Either it’s Martha back, or …

A moan. More scratching.

Not someone. Some
thing
.

Thunk
.

Damn, they’re here.

Some kind of doody military hospital this has turned out to be. I thought I’d have more time before they found me. A unique combination of chill and sickness moves over my body. I’d forgotten how they made me feel. And yet now that they’re back, it’s like no time has passed at all.

I back up a little.

Thunk
. The door is moving slightly. Louder moans. There’s more than one of them here now. Three or four, at a guess, because that door looked to be pretty thick. But I’m not taking bets on it holding forever.

Think.
Quickly
.

I reach for the bedside cabinet and shove it up against the door.

Now … the window? Take a chair to it? Smash the glass and make my escape? Not a great option. Escape to where? A courtyard with nowhere to go …
think!
I look around desperately.

There’s a square up on the wall, not much bigger than a dog flap, covered by some kind of plastic grating. An air-conditioning vent or something? I seize the chair and pull it over to the wall, jumping up to get a better look. Meanwhile, the zoms back at the door are getting coordinated, their random
thunk
s are in sync, and the door is complaining. Yay for teamwork. I won’t have long.

I reach up to the vent and my hands grip the grating. A couple of rattles and it’s off, revealing a welcoming hole, just big enough for this slinky gal to fit into.

But it’s too frickin’ high. Need something else to stand on.

I look desperately around the room.

Only one thing for it, the bed.

I jump down from the chair. OK, so this bed’s on wheels, should be easy enough. With sweaty palms I try to drag it. Nuts, it has some kind of brake. I look for it. I can’t see it.

There’s a cracking noise from the door. They’ve managed to dislodge the lock — the fixing is coming away from the frame — I’ve got seconds.

Come on!
I search for the brake, grabbing at various handles. The head of the bed shoots up, things
clunk
and sink and rise again, and the bed takes on all sorts of un-bedly shapes. But the sodding thing doesn’t move.

The cabinet falls over and the door flies open. They’re in. It’s over for me.

I jump around the other side of the bed, so it’s a zombie-Bobby sandwich with bed filling. I look at them. I can’t not. I should be focusing on finding the damn brake and putting all my last good efforts into moving this thing, but I’m caught fast in the inevitability of my bloody death, ripped to pieces by these fiends.

Children
.

Zombinos. Half a dozen of them, and then more, spilling into the room. Kids. Younger than me. Nine, ten years old?
God
. I feel my throat clench in sadness. Some are naked. The ones that aren’t, their clothes are ripped and soiled, soaked through with patches of blood and spit and whatever else can seep out of a human orifice. Their young faces are
caved in, hollowed, the color of bruises. Some of them have chunks of flesh missing. Fingers are bent back and broken, limbs are missing, and one boy is walking on a stump where his foot used to be, like a city pigeon.

Staggering, the leaders of the pack stop for a second and take me in. We stare at each other over the bed. The tallest is a girl, long and pale and bare, her flat chest and stomach engraved with a crude
Y
shape. They cut her open and sewed her up again. But this is not the most remarkable thing about her. She has crazy, curly red hair. I’ll bet it used to be beautiful, her mother’s pride and joy — but now it is tatted, almost like she back-combed it specially because she’s gone zombie. And half of her head is missing, like it’s a dippy egg with the top taken off. She stands there, swaying, naked and unashamed. I look into her cloudy eyes, trying to tell her
No, please don’t hurt me, Red — I’m only a kid, a kid like you
.

The crowd does not move. Maybe they sense my helplessness?

I feel a sting of hope in my chest. Maybe they’ll refuse to attack another kid, like we have some kind of unspoken understanding and they want me to live out the life they never had the chance to experience.

And then Red flings back her head and roars.

They move, as one, toward me. This is no young people’s alliance. They want my brains.

Finding my strength, I crank the bed with all my might, lifting one end and forcibly dragging the thing on its wheels toward the wall and my only hope of escape. Red is reaching for me. I duck down, then leap onto the bed, making a grab for the plastic chair, planting it hopefully on the end of the bed, and jumping up onto it. The Undead kiddies pour toward me, hands out, and in my haste I slip and fall back down on the
bed again. The bent and broken fingers find me, clawing, trying to rip flesh from bone — but I’m lucky because they only find my fleece, and before they can reach more I’ve rolled off the bed to the other side in a reckless tumble.

There’s no time to languish on the floor. Tempting as it is to scuttle under the bed, I know that won’t trick them for more than a couple of seconds. They’re kids, too, and they know my moves; they probably hid under the bed from the monsters who bit them.

I try to spring up, but I’m wrapped in something — some kind of twine holding my arms to my body. I pull on it and there’s a clatter. It’s my IV line, still attached to a bag hanging off a metal pole. But now the bag has spilled out onto the floor, mixed with the Pee Lake, and soaked my legs. The pole lies next to me. I don’t even need to think about it; I grab the weapon, scramble to my feet, and leap onto the bed.

Swinging the pole round my head, I let out a guttural yell as I clash a couple of kids. The first victim falls over, and my pole continues to a second. The head splits, an overripe pumpkin spraying foul-smelling gunk over its neighbors. I dodge the spatter and then I’m swinging again. The top part of the pole that held the bag has come off, and now the end is sharp and pointy.
Good. We like sharp and pointy
. I shove it at the boy with the pigeon stump; it’s not a direct hit, but as balance is not his thing, he’s pushed back and falls over.

So it’s three down, four or five or six to go.

They pause for a second; maybe they’re not used to this. They’re kids, after all. It must be quite an effective turn playing cute little doe-eyed monsters. Their victims probably don’t fight back until it’s too damn late.