The bus ride from Trent’s house to the processing centre gave new meaning to the term “awkward”. Elliott sulked up the back and refused to speak or look at anyone. His zombified girlfriend and one of his most trusted friends were a few feet away, strapped into their seats.
Miles sat opposite, frequently readjusting the blankets covering the zombies whenever they fell down. He made sure he averted his eyes while doing this – even though Amy was now undead, he didn’t want to give Elliott the impression that he was doing anything inappropriate or trying to sneak a peek. But it wouldn’t have mattered, since Elliott spent the duration of the journey staring out the window with a permanent scowl affixed to his face.
While they were somewhat sympathetic to his situation, Adam and Miles were not particularly impressed with the manner in which Elliott had handled himself back at the house. Once Elliott realised what was going on he screamed abuse at Zombies Trent and Amy, who would have had no idea what was happening, before storming off and locking himself inside the bus. Adam was less than pleased about being left one short to do the job. He was even less impressed when Elliott sat inside the minibus and refused to unlock the doors for about twenty minutes.
Adam himself was prone to the occasional melodramatic outburst and juvenile temper tantrum, but even he thought this was all a bit over the top.
Miles and Adam finally managed to load the two zombies inside, and were now running the gauntlet of dead-heads as they tried to make it inside the processing centre. Some of the protesters had caught on to the fact that Dead Rite had been sneaking in through the alternative entrance, and this time they were ready for them. Two dozen hippies converged on the vehicle as it pulled up at the boom gate and gave the minibus’s creaking suspension a rigorous workout.
After a hectic couple of minutes of being rocked violently back and forth, they eventually made it into the centre. Everyone was left a little shaken up. Miles was particularly troubled; not so much by the protesters almost tipping the minibus over, but by what he had seen out the window on the way in.
Over on the grassed area, tossing a frisbee around with some of the dreadlocked dead-heads, he saw a group of schoolgirls. One of them looked just like his sister.
But he didn’t have time to worry about that right now.
He removed the straps holding Trent and Amy in place, and then he and Adam guided both zombies off the bus.
Elliott moved to follow, but Adam stopped him.
“I think it’d be best if you stayed here a while to cool off, guy,” he said.
The door closed, and Elliott fell back into his seat.
His mind kept returning to Trent and Amy, reexamining recent events for clues as to how long this had been going on. It didn’t take him long to realise the signs were there if he had bothered to look for them. All those times Amy said she was sick, or visiting friends out of town, or attending funerals for distant relatives, she was probably with Trent. He thought that her extended family had an unusually high mortality rate, but he didn’t want to pry – in this day and age it was entirely plausible.
Just last week, when Amy told him she was going out of town, he called up Trent to see if he wanted to hang out. He received no answer, and Trent never responded to any of his messages, but Elliott thought nothing of it.
He tried to think back to when this all could have started, to when he first noticed Amy’s behaviour changing. He wanted to have at least some idea of how long this had been going on behind his back. She had been acting strange for so long that it seemed almost normal. It must have been years.
Then it dawned on him. It was years. Three years, to be exact.
This all must have started during those two weeks they spent barricaded inside Trent’s house, back when the initial zombie outbreak happened.
At the time he thought there was something odd going on with her. He’d wake up in the middle of the night and find her gone, or he’d walk into a room and Amy and Trent would suddenly fall silent. But it was a crazy time; the world was falling apart, no one knew how much longer they had left to live, and so he pushed those thoughts out of his mind. He was grateful that Trent offered them security and hospitality during such a distressing time, but it turned out he was offering Amy a whole lot more.
He looked up and saw Zombie Trent in front of him, through the bus’s front windscreen. He was being shackled and fitted into an orange boilersuit. His pale dead eyes stared straight back at Elliott, as if he was looking directly at him.
Maybe he was imagining it, but Elliott thought he detected the slightest of grins forming on Zombie Trent’s face.
If Elliott was in any way capable of rational thought, he would have understood that nothing remained of Trent. That person was long gone. Trent ceased to exist – he didn’t recognise Elliott, or know who he was and what he’d done to him. All Elliott was to him was a living, breathing organism that he wouldn’t mind sinking his teeth into given half the chance.
But in his highly emotional and agitated state, Elliott could almost feel Zombie Trent taunting him. This former human, and his former friend, had a look of smug self-satisfaction plastered across his rapidly decaying face.
That was all it took for Elliott to snap.
He jumped from the bus and stormed over to where Zombie Trent was standing. With little regard for his own safety, he punched him square in the face.
Zombie Trent went down like a slaughterhouse cow. It was as easy as knocking over a store mannequin.
Elliott continued to pummel him while he was on the ground, his hands and legs still shackled.
“You think this is funny?” Elliott shouted at him before unleashing a flurry of kicks to Zombie Trent’s midsection. “You think this is funny? I know you can hear me!”
Adam and Miles couldn’t get over there fast enough. Neither one could believe what they were seeing, or that Elliott would do something so reckless.
“You’ve been doing this to me for three years?!”
Miles grabbed hold of Elliott and tried to pull him away, but his blind fury seemed to give him superhuman strength.
Two more centre staff members rushed over to help. They were eventually able to drag Elliott away before he could do any further damage.
“Have you lost your mind?” Adam screamed at him.
But Elliott couldn’t hear him. His focus was exclusively on Zombie Trent.
There was every chance that he had lost his mind.
Fabian was growing restless. There was a war going on, but all anyone was doing was standing around and waiting for something to happen. The Zeroes had been protesting outside the processing centre for months now, and still nothing had been achieved. He knew that change took time, but he never really had the kind of attention span that would see things through to the end. If he knew it was going to take this long he might have had second thoughts about getting involved in the first place.
Another Z-Pro truck approached the processing centre, turning off from the main road and coming towards the front entrance. The assembled dead-heads put down their acoustic guitars and halted their games of hacky-sack to retrieve their placards and go through the motions once again. They chanted slogans. They laid down in the truck’s path. They pounded on the sides and rocked it back and forth, oblivious to the distress this caused the former humans inside. They did the same things they always did, and it produced the same result: the Z-Pro truck and the processing centre staff were inconvenienced for a few minutes, before the hired goons came in and restored order.
This wasn’t rebellion. They weren’t sticking it to the man. This was basically an officially-sanctioned protest. Everyone obediently remained inside their designated protest areas. This allowed them to think they were maintaining the rage, but it was about as effective as protesting the use of third world sweatshops and child labour by going into a Nike store and filling out a complaint form.
Fabian was sick of waiting. This was a cause that needed action, not empty gestures.
While every
one else was distracted by the commotion at the front entrance, Fabian managed to slip away unnoticed from the main group. He found a blind spot on the perimeter fence, unseen by any of the guards and hidden from view from the lookout tower.
He reached into his rucksack and fished out a pair of wire cutters.
His hands moved fast. A series of rapid snips, and he had cut a hole in the wire mesh fence big enough for him to slip through. This wasn’t all that difficult, since the processing centre was hardly Alcatraz. It had been erected in haste with temporary fencing, and its main function was to keep zombies in rather than humans out. It was surprising that it had taken this long for someone to actually try it.
He looked around to see if anyone had spotted him. No one had.
One fence was down, and there was one more to go. His pulse raced as he set to work on the second one. But this fence would prove to be a much greater challenge. It was made from galvanised wire, and it was significantly thicker and stronger. It quickly dawned on him that he hadn’t really thought this part through.
He pushed down hard on the handle of the cutters. Nothing. The blade barely made an indentation. The wire on this fence was five times the thickness than that of the first. He may as well have been using plastic scissors, for all the good the cutters were doing. Being a vegan with the biceps of a ten-year-old girl didn’t help either.
When it became blindingly obvious that he didn’t have a hope in hell of cutting his way through, he assessed his other options. Above him, a tangled mess of razor wire loomed menacingly. He knew this was the riskiest of all his options, but by now he was running on pure adrenaline. He scaled to the top of the fence, then carefully snipped away at the razor wire.
One minute later, and a section of razor wire fell away. He climbed over the top and jumped to the ground. His clothes snagged on the way down, and the razor wire mauled in his $400 designer jeans. Normally he would have been devastated, but on this occasion he didn’t have time to dwell on it. He was inside.
For a moment he just stood there, not knowing what he should do next. He was like the proverbial dog that had caught the car. He was inside the processing centre. He had made it further in than any other protester. Now what?
A wave of anxiety hit him. For all Fabian’s talk of civil disobedience he had never really broken the law before, aside from some minor vandalism. He wasn’t sure what sort of punishment he’d be facing for breaking into a government facility, but he assumed it would be more than just a light slap on the wrist. And with ginger dreadlocks hanging halfway down his back and his “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt, he didn’t exactly blend in with his surroundings.
But he knew he couldn’t just stand there and do nothing. So Fabian, the anti-corporate warrior, took out his Apple iPhone and filmed his surroundings.
What he captured was far from earth-shattering. Just a whole bunch of zombies being unloaded from the Z-Pro truck and taken away for processing. Over on the other side of the compound, a chain gang of zombies in orange boilersuits were led away to the transportation area, en route to one of the massive desert facilities where they all eventually ended up.
It was nothing he hadn’t seen on TV before, and there was none of the rumoured abuse and degradation that had been spoken about. Everything was proper and above board. No one was beating the zombies or breaching the NEVADA law. It was such an anti-climax.
He was about to give up hope of filming anything worthwhile when he caught some movement out of the corner of his eye. A UMC worker jumped from his vehicle and stormed over to where one of the zombies was awaiting processing.
Fabian whipped his phone around to film it. Viewing the events as they unfolded through the iPhone’s LCD screen, he couldn’t quite believe what came next.
The UMC worker swung his fist at the zombie and knocked it to the ground. He then unloaded a barrage of vicious kicks, screaming profanities and abuse at the top of his lungs.
Fabian crept closer to the action. He zoomed in as tight as he could. It was then that he recognised the deranged assailant. This was Elliott, Miles’ loser friend who he had seen hanging around Clea’s place a couple of times before.
Fabian held onto the phone with both of his trembling hands. His right hand was cramping after cutting through all that wire, but he ignored the pain. He was both terrified and exhilarated, giddy with nervous anticipation. He wasn’t sure what was happening or why, but he knew this was big. This could be the Zapruder film or Rodney King tape of his generation. This footage was going around the world.
“Hey!”
Fabian flinched when he heard a guard shouting at him from the other side of the compound.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the guard demanded to know. “You shouldn’t be in here!”
The guard saw what Fabian was doing, then what Elliott was doing, and quickly deduced the potential implications of what was about to happen. He sprinted towards Fabian, while the other UMC workers and centre staff pulled Elliott away from the battered zombie.
Fabian knew he had to move fast. He fiddled with his phone, standing completely still as the guard came charging towards him like a wounded bull. He didn’t even try to get out of the way when the guard lunged and tackled him to the ground.
“How did you get in here?” the guard bellowed, shoving Fabian’s face into the dirt and twisting his arms behind his back. “This is a restricted area!”
Two more guards rushed over to lend assistance. They pulled Fabian to his feet and dragged him out of the area in a choke hold.
Once Fabian was taken away, one of the guards noticed the iPhone lying in the dirt. He picked it up and looked at the screen.
It said: “Message sent”.
Chapter 14