2
On Christmas Day, as I set the pudding on the table, I got a call on my mobile. Grateful to avoid my stepfather’s annual moan about how the bought pudding would never be as good as one made from scratch, I raced up the stairs to where I’d left the phone in my bedroom. By the time I got there, it had stopped ringing. The number came up as Malcolm Brannick. I’d had ‘Merry Christmas’ texts from him in previous years, but I didn’t consider us close enough to warrant a phone call. It was just past three—more than enough time for him to have had too many glasses of Baileys. The phone rang again. I answered.
‘Hi, Malcolm. Merry Christmas.’
He gave a short bark of a laugh. ‘Sure. Listen, Viv, something’s happened. You need to promise me you’ll keep it confidential.’
‘No.’ The last and only time he’d asked me to keep something confidential was when he’d got involved with one of our temps and asked me to lie to his wife about where he’d been the previous night. She hadn’t asked, but his marriage issues weren’t my problem.
‘Vivia, please. It’s nothing like that thing with Emma. I promise.’
He sounded really desperate. I gave in. ‘All right, fine, what is it?’
I never found out what he was going to say, although later I was able to hazard a good guess. There was some muffled arguing, the phone made a clunking sound, and then a female voice said, ‘Vivia?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Jillie. I’m really sorry about this. My husband’s got himself drunk again. He’s been phoning everybody in his bloody phone book apologising for one thing or another.’
I laughed, but she didn’t sound happy. ‘That’s okay. Well, have a good Christmas, and tell Malcolm I’ll see him on Wednesday.’
By the time I got down stairs, where the usual post-Christmas-lunch arguments were in full flow, I’d completely forgotten about it. The next day, while my family went to a Boxing Day service, I worked on my laptop, drawing up some new templates for dismissal cases. After the templates were done to my satisfaction, I caught up on work emails.
I went to bed early, pleased I wouldn’t be starting the new year with a backlog.
The phone rang at four in the morning, and it took a while before I realised the ringing wasn’t a dream. I knocked the phone off the bedside table before I managed to snag it. The number came up ‘Withheld.’ No one calls before seven a.m. to give good news. I answered, my stomach in a knot.
‘Hello?’
‘Vivia? Sorry to wake you.’ The voice was familiar, but my dream-fogged brain couldn’t place it.
‘Who is this?’
‘Oh, sorry. It’s Kingsley Dunne... Detective Sergeant Dunne with the Metanatural Crimes Unit.’
Oh great. So the endless emails and occasional phone calls were escalating into middle-of-the-night calls. Dunne was new to the Unit. I’d met him on a zombie call-out, and he’d decided I was the go-to person for every question he had on the metanatural—most of which he could have just looked up on Wikipedia. Nice man, but lazy.
However, in my line of business, it was useful to have a friendly police contact. I bit back my grumbles and sat up. I leaned over and switched the lamp on. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘The NRT rang. They got a call-out.’
I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. The NRT was the Necroambulist Response Team. I consulted for them, but rarely in the middle of the night. By the time I was called in, everyone there was either living, dead, or the living dead, or would be one or the other shortly, and me getting there early wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.
‘They need me now? Can’t it wait till morning? The NRTs usually take hours to clear a scene.’
‘Uh, probably.’ An odd note crept into Dunne’s voice. ‘Actually, I was calling to give you a heads-up. You’ve been so helpful to me. I thought I’d return the favour.’
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I could think of only one reason Dunne would give me a heads-up about an NRT call-out. Someone I knew was dead and had reanimated.
I closed my eyes. ‘Who is it?’
Dunne apologised, as if it could possibly be his fault, then, ‘It’s Malcolm Brannick.’
To my everlasting shame, my first thought was Thank God.
3
Thank God because it wasn’t someone else. It wasn’t a friend, a family member, or a loved one. It wasn’t someone I actually liked. Guilt followed quickly. I didn’t like Malcolm, but I wouldn’t wish necroambulism on anyone. Fortunately my brain kept the thought to itself, and I didn’t blurt it out.
My second thought was a little more reassuring. Maybe they’re wrong.
A little known fact, and one that rarely made it into the redtops: more people died because their neighbour thought they were a zombie than died because their neighbour actually was a zombie. The majority of call-outs were false alarms, usually neighbours mistaking a bad flu for something more macabre, and resulted in nothing more than a healthy dose of neighbourly resentment and possibly some expensive redecorating after the NRTs smashed in the front door.
So the first thing I said to Dunne was, ‘Are they sure?’
‘His neighbour caught him eating her cat.’
Oh my God. I turned the image round in my mind, but no matter which way I twisted it, I couldn’t find an innocent explanation. Something horrible occurred to me. ‘What about his family?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dunne said.
I stared at the floor. Thank God, I’d thought.
First rule of zombie club: families are eaten first. Sometimes they’d only be bitten—and that’s if they weren’t so lucky.
Ben wouldn’t have been there. He always went back to his mother on Boxing Day, but he wasn’t Malcolm’s only child. There was a younger boy. I couldn’t recall how old little Finn was, but it wasn’t old enough to start school.
I’d only met Jillie once, at some office shindig. She’d been unsure of herself in a room of people she didn’t know and had a habit of covering her mouth when she laughed.
That Ben wouldn’t be there was something to be grateful for, but it didn’t feel like enough. Not when the much-too-nice Jillie and her little boy were... what? Dead? Worse than dead?
It felt as if a little whirlpool was sucking away at the inside of my stomach. I’d been to any number of zombie extractions—some of them pretty nasty—but it was the first time I knew the people involved.
An image flooded my mind: That like some of the other houses I’d seen, I’d get there and there’d be nothing left of Malcolm’s family but bloody smears and rags of flesh.
I didn’t think Malcolm was a carrier, but then it wasn’t something people talked about. My mouth felt dry. ‘What about infection? Was he bitten? Are there any others?’
‘The neighbour didn’t mention anyone else, but the NRTs are still on their way there. We only just got the call.’
Newbie zombies had around twelve to forty-eight hours after they died before the hunger became too much and they couldn’t control it no matter how much they might have wanted to. If Malcolm was eating a cat, it might mean he still had enough brain power to try to stave the hunger off with animal flesh instead of human. ‘Has he lost control yet?’ I asked.
‘I really don’t know, Vivia, but I’ve got to go. I’m sorry about your friend.’ He hung up.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at my feet. This was going to kill Obe. He was a lovely man, but he’d only just got back to work after three months off for depression. He’d been looking forward to passing on the management baton to one of us. This was going to throw him back into the chasm.
Obe grew up in a succession of foster homes (either angels or devils, Obe called them) and had met Malcolm and his brother Neil at the Cooke-Melville Children’s Home. ‘That one was all devils,’ Obe told me later, after he testified at the inquiry into abuse at the home. Malcolm and Neil Brannick were the closest thing Obe had to family.
Maybe the whole cat thing was some sort of
weird Malcolm joke. I needed to know for sure that Malcolm was dead before I threw Obe into the black.
The time on my screen read 4.31—a little too late for me to be able to borrow my stepfather’s van and get it back before he woke up. I scrolled down my contact list until I found the local cab place. I dialled and was promised a car within five minutes.
I dressed quickly. The knock at the door came just as I was checking the backpack I kept my dying supplies in.
The driver was waiting in the car, a paperback resting on the steering wheel. I knocked on the window, and he unlocked the door. The car smelt of stale cigarette smoke.
Being a death hag means I have a tendency to look a little...well, dead. I rifled through the front pocket of the backpack until I found foundation and blusher. I’m not normally one for much makeup, and I’ve found most cops don’t care what you look like as long as you don’t cause them any extra paperwork, but it’s never a good idea to turn up somewhere looking even a little dead, especially if that particular somewhere is a somewhere the police are searching for the living dead.
I shuffled into the middle of the seat, patted at my face with powder, and checked my hair. It’s long, black, and glossy when I’m not being dead and frizzy and dull when I am. I’m vain about my hair, and why shouldn’t I be? The rest of me’s no picture. I tied it back into a bun and peered at myself in the rearview mirror. I looked at least semi-professional.
The road was quiet. It was too early for the shops to be open, and any commuters not away for the Christmas holidays were still tucked up in bed enjoying their Saturday lie-in.
I settled back into the seat. My thoughts went to the call on Christmas Day. Was that what Malcolm was going to tell me? That he was dead? But why? Malcolm and I weren’t friends. He’d once done something for me that I would always be grateful for, but not enough that he could possibly think I’d risk a mandatory five-year prison sentence for concealing knowledge of a zombie. I would have turned him in. He’d have known that.
Had he only just been bitten? Not dead yet? Again, that made no sense. Anyone bitten by a zombie was guaranteed a life-threatening fever. Ninety-eight percent of the bitten died of it within twenty-four hours, then reanimated. The remaining two percent became carriers. If he was bitten, but alive when he made the call, he still had a chance. A small one, but a chance. There was no reason for him to call me, knowing I’d turn him in. I wouldn’t have kept it confidential. Not something like that.
I sighed and stared out the window. Maybe I was overthinking it. Maybe he had just been drunk again.
I’d never been to Malcolm’s house, although I’d been to Wimbledon a few times. It seemed much like any other London suburb to me—a village that got swallowed by urban sprawl and wasn’t much more than a lot of post-war housing, a few historical curiosities (including a suitably old church), and a high street with all the usual chains. I’d been told there were a few decent clubs and pubs, but I’d never been interested enough to investigate. The only other thing I knew about it was the tennis, and since that was a game I’d last played in primary school and associated with being bored and slightly damp from spring showers, the area was new to me. We turned onto the high street. Brightly coloured Rudolphs, stars, and trees blinked overhead and reflected colour onto the rain-slick road.
The roads had been quiet, but as we passed the station, I became aware of little knots of people all moving in the same direction. We turned down off the high street into a residential area. The immediate neighbourhood was standard post-war housing: semi-detached houses with enough space out front for a weeny garden or a parking space, but not both. Finally the car turned the corner into St John Terrace, where the night changed colour.
Lights flared in the darkness: flashing blue on the tops of the police cars blocking both ends of the road, the revolving yellow of the containment van somewhere in the middle, and flickers of white light as the crowds at either end of the street viewed the proceedings through the screens of their phones.
Cars were parked all the way up to the police cordon. The closest constable frowned at us and waved, indicating there was no way through.
The driver stopped. I took a deep breath, paid him, then grabbed my backpack and hopped out.
The road itself was short, only eight or so tightly packed houses on each side, and police vans blocked either end of the street. Cameras flashed constantly, and I spotted at least one TV camera.
The crowd appeared mostly human. Mostly. I spotted a banshee and a couple of furry-faced street weasels near the front of the crush. A pair of cybergeeks, wires protruding from their necks, watched the proceedings from the back. And those were just the ones unable to pass for human. The banshee held a sign that read We’re People Too. I’m always amazed at how quickly people flock to these things. The nosy must give a prayer of thanks to Twitter every day.
As always, the crowd was self-segregated with protesters for non-human rights on one side and pro-humans on the other, so they could shout and jeer at each other but not stand close enough to actually hold a civilised conversation. About half of the pro-human lot wore the red scarves that labelled them as Human Preservation Front. I gave them a wide berth.
I headed for the closest constable, a woman with a bored expression at the front of the pro-human lot. I showed her my Lipscombe identification, and she waved me through without argument.
I ducked under the yellow biohazard tape. There were police everywhere. Constables guarded either end of the road and knocked on the doors of the neighbours. Two black-helmeted Necroambulist Response Team members stood on Malcolm’s front step.
Despite what Patricia seemed to think, keeping the zompocalypse at bay was a multi-organisation endeavour, and I was hardly big enough to be a cog in its machine. Even the police were secondary. The Necroambulism Response Team were its own independent unit. Tall, well built, uniformed, and almost all male, they were the firemen of the dead, the men who got a call in the middle of the night and raced out, sirens blazing.
An orange NRT van, its double doors open onto the pavement, was parked diagonally across the road, as close as it could get to a pebble-dashed semi-detached house. The black letters on the van read Necroambulist Response Team and under that: Danger—Live Contaminants. The van stood empty, and a little flash of hope went through me. All Malcolm needed was a heartbeat. Everyone would go away, and he’d be left with an apology and a pamphlet explaining where he could claim damages.
The house still had its Christmas lights up, and I was only half-surprised to see Malcolm was that person in the neighbourhood who went all out with the decorations. There was a Santa and reindeer on the roof, and a big ‘Merry Christmas’ in flashing green and red lights over the top of the door. Strands of white and blue lights hung from each window. The remains of the door lay on the pavement.
Despite the early hour, lights blazed from every house on the street, and most of the windows had someone hanging out of them. Only the house to the left of Malcolm’s was dark, but an elderly black man, his hair puffed out like a dandelion, peeped out from behind net curtains.
The house on the right was the same shape as the others in the road, but had a red brick frontage rather than the white paint or pebble-dash of the rest. A nightgowned woman stood on the front step, hands waggling as she spoke to the two policemen opposite her.
One was Kingsley Dunne. His thick eyebrows were slightly raised as he listened, and that, along with his round face and bald head, made him look like a tufted owl. He wore his unofficial plain-clothes uniform: neat white shirt, blue tie, and neatly pressed trousers. I didn’t know the other policeman, a podgy, ginger-haired man in his early twenties who looked like he was trying to grow a beard and not succeeding.
Movement drew my attention to the remains of the front door as Jillie hobbled through it. Five armed NRTs circled her, careful to stay out of reach. Each guard held a wooden pole ending in a metal loop attached to her hands, feet, and neck. A Hannibal-Lector-
style mask hid the bottom half of her face. Someone must have told them she was a snake shifter because another NRT followed a few feet behind, holding a giant net on a pole. They weren’t taking any chances on her shifting and slithering away.
Her thick red hair frizzed out around her face like she was undergoing sunset, and she was wearing only a too-short vest top and a pair of pale pink pants. Stretch-marked skin sagged over the top of her pants. There was no sign of injury on her pale skin. I reached inside for that part of me that recognised the dead and felt a queasy trickle of power flow into my diaphragm.
Still alive. At least for now.
4
Jillie’s eyes rolled, and I saw nothing but the whites—doped to the gills. The NRT in front tugged again. Jillie stumbled towards the orange containment van. She moved slowly—the dogcatchers around her limbs wouldn’t let her do otherwise, despite the guards holding the metal loops. It took some time for the group to negotiate the ramp at the back of the van before she finally disappeared inside.
There would be a metal cage in the van and places for the loops where they detached from the metal poles, and until she got to the Detention Centre, she’d be completely immobile. Shouts and catcalls rose from the crowd, then died down again.
My eyes were drawn back to the ruined front door, but neither Malcolm nor Finn appeared. I glanced into the van and wished I hadn’t. The NRTs were in the process of attaching the metal loops to steel rings on the side of the van. I could only imagine what that might feel like, to be drugged and dragged from your home in the freezing cold, in front of all your neighbours. I shivered. Poor Jillie.
‘Thought you might turn up early.’
I turned to see Dunne walking towards me. He’d found a scarf from somewhere and had drawn it up over his neck and mouth against the cold air. The ginger-haired young man followed a step behind.
‘I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘Jillie’s alive at least. That’s something.’
Dunne shrugged. ‘Could be infected. Could be in two days she’d bite your nose off if she had half a chance.’ His voice was muffled behind the scarf. He glanced at me, and his expression softened. ‘Sorry, that was insensitive. You friends?’
I shook my head. ‘I hardly know her. What about the rest of the family? Malcolm’s got a little boy. I think he’s only two or three. Is he okay?’
‘Boy’s in the loft with Brannick. They’re trying to talk them out.’
I felt a little ill. Another common zombie scenario: hostages, except their demands never included pizza. We were interrupted as an NRT I didn’t recognise beckoned to Dunne from the remains of the front door. Dunne turned to me. ‘Excuse me.’ He walked towards the house and went inside.
I glanced upwards. The house had originally been two stories like the others in the street, but at some time a timber loft extension had been added, turning Malcolm’s house into a rectangular box. No light showed from the single loft window.
The ginger policeman turned to me. ‘Zombie ran up with the boy the moment they bashed in the door,’ he said, putting his hand out. ‘Shawn Little.’
‘Vivia Brisk,’ I said, grateful for the distraction. I didn’t want to think about what was going on up there in the dark. His hand was dry and warm.
‘So this is what a death witch looks like. Dunne told me you were ugly as sin, but I couldn’t quite picture it till now.’
‘Wow, thanks. I always love a compliment.’
‘No, seriously. You look like a Halloween costume,’ he said earnestly, as if I just didn’t get it. ‘Ugh, you smell like death too.’
What was with this wally? I gave him a closer look. He was taller than me, but not by much. His tailored suit did its best to disguise the beer belly, but couldn’t hide the double chin. He smelt like warm fur and tuna, and his eyes were an unnaturally bright shade of green. ‘You’re not human.’
He smiled. His teeth were very white. ‘Neither are you. I’m the new sniffer.’
That explained the smell comment. ‘What are you?’
‘Cat.’ And that explained the rudeness.
This was why the police usually hired dogs—much easier to get on with. I wondered if Little was the type of cat who got off on crapping in the neighbours’ veggie patch. The Lipscombe had more than one cat client fighting an ASBO for doing that.
‘Shifter or wereperson?’ I asked, more out of habit than out of any real interest. Shifters had the ability to actually shift into their totem animal; werepeople just took on their characteristics.
‘Shifter. Your standard Felis Domesticus. British Shorthair, if you want to be specific.’
I nodded and stomped my feet to try to warm them. It didn’t work. It never did. ‘Do you know how Malcolm died?’
The cat shook his head. ‘Wife claims he was alive when she went to bed. Guess we’ll find out if he agrees to an autopsy.’
My gaze shot upwards at a creaking sound. The loft window at the top of the house opened. Malcolm swung his legs out. They were bare, and he wore only a pair of blue striped boxer shorts. He was alone. My heart skipped a beat before I realised Malcolm would be covered in blood if he had attacked his son.
Malcolm was definitely dead. Still moving, but definitely dead. The hag part of me was offended at the feeling of wrongness emanating from him.
A small hand reached through the window and grabbed Malcolm’s boxer shorts. Malcolm twisted from his seat on the sill and gently moved it away. I let out the breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding.
Despite his efforts, I’d never paid much attention to the man’s physique, but Malcolm was scrawnier than I would have imagined, all silver hair and skinny legs.
He wasn’t noticeably decayed, so either he hadn’t been dead long or he’d been very, very bad. The cat’s flesh alone wouldn’t have staved off decay for more than an hour or two.
There was no sign of injury, nothing to indicate how he had died. He sat on the window sill, legs dangling. He stared upwards, his mouth set in a tight line. I followed his gaze and saw nothing but grey cloud.
A loud crash sounded from within the house. Malcolm looked behind him, then peered down as if contemplating jumping.
A fall wouldn’t destroy a zombie, of course, but without fresh flesh to reknit the damage to his bones and muscle, he’d only lose control faster. He certainly wouldn’t be able to outrun the police blocking either end of the street. I’d always thought the man was stupid, but I didn’t think he was that stupid.
I thought of the little boy in the attic with him, and I called, ‘Don’t be an arse, Malcolm. Don’t jump in front of Finn.’
Malcolm heard me. He looked down, clearly surprised to see me. He looked up, and an expression of relief washed over his face. Then he pushed back with his feet against the wall and jumped, arms straight out in front of him, as if he were diving into a swimming pool.