Later that day, Steve called all the staff in for an emergency meeting to inform them of the situation at Graves End. He then outlined Elliott’s proposal – rather than report it to the authorities, which they were required by law to do, Dead Rite would attempt to undertake the job themselves. After a week or two out there, they would have collected enough zombies to pay off the fine and all of the business’s debts, and each member of staff would take home the equivalent of eight months’ salary. Steve stressed that what they were suggesting here was highly illegal and potentially quite dangerous, and he would understand if anyone declined to take part.
But there were no dissenting voices among the staff. They had made up their collective minds as soon as they’d heard of how much money there was to be made. Everyone was ready to leave immediately, and they seemed a little disappointed when they learned that they would have to wait until tomorrow morning to commence work on the job, since Steve wanted to spend the rest of the day preparing for it.
They did get a bigger bus. Marcus was able to obtain an old school bus, a fifty-seater, at short notice thanks to a friend of a friend who worked at the police auctions. Steve wasn’t sure they had the money for it, but Marcus assured him he could get it for a bargain-basement price: “It’s amazing how much more affordable a vehicle becomes once someone’s been murdered in it,” Marcus explained to him.
Elliott, Miles, Marcus and Felix were put to work modifying the interior of the new bus to accommodate their needs. The seats were ripped out to make room for more zombies, and a retractable folding gate installed to separate the driver from the undead cargo. When it was finished, the bus could hold about eighty zombies standing up.
Adam and Erin gave the exterior a makeover. They added a quick coat of shiny black paint, then airbrushed a logo on the side that was remarkably similar to Z-Pro’s. It was Miles who pointed out the necessity of this; he said that if an unfamiliar bus kept turning up to the processing centre and dropping off busload after busload of zombies then it might raise a few questions. He figured that if it looked enough like a Z-Pro truck, the centre staff would assume it’s one of theirs and wave them on through.
The other thing they needed was more employees. Steve made a few phone calls and was able to find a further half-dozen workers who could come in and help out at short notice. All were former UMC employees who had lost their jobs once the firms they worked for went broke.
It was fair to say that these recruits weren’t exactly of the highest quality. Steve was forced to lower the bar considerably, and these people were more or less otherwise unemployable. He didn’t bother with the usual processes like checking references or their criminal history, since he doubted any of them would have made the cut. The only thing he cared about was whether they could turn up every day, do as they were told and keep their mouths shut.
Miles was yet to make his mind up about the Graves End job. The prospect of all that money was certainly very alluring, but he still had this nagging feeling of apprehension gnawing away at him. It was an opportunity that seemed too good to be true, and so logic dictated that it probably was. There were hazards involved with every job, no matter how simple it may initially seem. Doing one this size was a massive risk – not to mention what would happen if they got caught.
He returned home that night to find Smokey waiting for him by the front gate. He wasn’t quite sure how Elliott’s grandparents’ cat ended up at his house, despite repeatedly telling Elliott he didn’t want him, but there he was. If there was one upside, it was that they were finally starting to get rid of all that tuna in the garage.
The cat wasn’t alone. There were also about two dozen Zeroes congregating out the front of his house. They were spread across the lawn, lounging around on the decrepit disease-infested couches they had dragged over and dumped in the front yard. A few more were hanging out up one of the trees, and another guy was lying on the roof, strumming an acoustic guitar while staring up at the sky.
The only person Miles recognised here was Amoeba, who was leaning against the garage door chatting up a girl with a shaved head, telling her about his plans to “live off the grid”. The rest, he had never seen before in his life.
It was official. His house was now a drop-in centre for drop outs.
He trudged slowly up the driveway. Any hope he may have had for a peaceful night’s rest before the big job tomorrow evaporated in an instant.
A delivery van pulled in behind him, and the driver jumped out carrying a large box.
“Sebastian Devereaux?” he said to Miles.
“I’m sorry?”
“I have a delivery here for Sebastian Devereaux.”
“I think you have the wrong address. There’s no one here called–”
Before Miles could finish, Amoeba rushed over. “That’s mine,” he said.
The driver looked Amoeba up and down. “You’re Sebastian Dev–”
“Uh-huh, that’s me,” he said, fumbling for his ID and signing the form.
Miles shook his head. Apparently Amoeba, or “Sebastian Devereaux” as he was also known, was having his mail delivered to the house now.
He walked up the steps to the front door, where Squealer the Tattooed Pig blocked the entrance. He was lying on his side and wheezing heavily.
“What have you done to the pig?” he asked one of the interlopers.
“Oh, nothing,” they replied. “He’s just had a bit too much space cake.”
“You fed the pig space cake?”
“Well, not directly. But Mai ate, like, a whole bunch of it, and she ended up blowing chunks all over the bathroom floor. We figured the easiest way to clean it up would be to get Squealer in there and, you know, let him do what pigs do naturally. Now he’s feeling a little worse for wear as a result. But don’t worry, he’ll be alright.”
Miles stepped around the munted pig and entered the house.
The whole place seemed to bulge with people, crammed inside every room. It felt like a living, breathing organism.
He decided it was time to have a serious talk with Clea about all of this. This was too much. He tolerated her having a few friends over, but this was testing the friendship. There had to be at least seventy or eighty people in and around his house, and almost all of them were complete strangers. He’d put up with it in the past since he relied on the income from the room she was renting. Hopefully, if everything went well with this Graves End job, money would no longer be a issue.
He pushed his way down the hallway and knocked on the door to Shae’s room. He received no answer. He called her name, then knocked again. Still no response.
He opened the door and found her lying face down on her bed. He walked over and nudged her shoulder. “Shae?”
Shae didn’t move. Miles thought she was sleeping at first, but she was completely unresponsive.
He gave her a light shake, and realised she was unconscious.
Panic hit him like a sledgehammer.
He grabbed hold of her with both hands and shook her. “Shae!” He lightly slapped her face a couple of times.
Shae groaned and opened her eyes sleepily. “Jesus, what’s your problem?” she said.
Miles expelled a lungful of air. “Thank God for that,” he said, quietly relieved.
Shae struggled to prop herself up. She looked around, her eyes still half-closed. “What are you doing in my room?”
“Look, I just came in here to–”
Miles stopped mid-sentence. Something wasn’t right with Shae. Her eyes were glassy and a deep shade of red. She could barely keep her head up, and seemed to be on the verge of nodding off at any moment.
“What?” she said irritably when Miles let the silence hang a bit too long.
“Are you stoned?”
Shae shook her head. “No, I’m just, um ... no.”
“You’re stoned.”
“No I’m not.”
Miles stood up. “Alright, who gave this to you?”
Shae collapsed back down onto her
bed and pulled a pillow over her face. “You’re not going to make a big deal out of this, are you?”
Miles could feel the anger bubbling up inside of him. “Shae, take it from me, you don’t want to get into this stuff at your age.”
“I’m almost sixteen, Miles. I’m not a child anymore. It’d be nice if you stopped treating me like one.”
“I understand that, but if you’re looking for a way to screw up the rest of your life then becoming a high school stoner is a great way to do it.”
“Would you rather I be like you and get drunk every night?”
This comment caught Miles off-guard. Her words stung, even if they were true.
“When you’re my age and earning your own money, you can do whatever you like,” he said. “But until then, you do what I tell you to. Okay?”
As soon as he said it, Miles realised he was quoting his father’s words verbatim. Although everyone turns into their parents eventually, it was a bit disconcerting to discover it happening at the age of twenty-three.
“I don’t know why you think you can hide it,” Shae said. “I see the empty bottles in the recycling bin. I can smell it on you every morning.”
Miles walked to the door. “You know what, I’m not even going to bother discussing this in the state you’re in. We can talk about this in the morning.”
“Miles, can you please just try and be cool about something for once in your life? It’s not that big a deal.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have the luxury of being cool about stuff anymore,” Miles said, his voice rising. “If our parents were still alive then they could be the ones to worry about you and I wouldn’t have to. But since I’m responsible for your wellbeing that means I have to be the bad guy.”
“God, what do you think is going to happen to me? Are you worried that I’ll end up living under a bridge somewhere, getting mixed up in heroin and prostitution?”
“No, I’m worried you’ll end up living in a share house as a twenty-nine-year-old professional student, getting mixed up in pointless activism and performance artists.”
“Oh great, so now I’m getting career advice from a glorified dog-catcher.”
“You think I enjoy working there, Shae?” Miles was shouting now, something he never did. “Or that I wanted to put my whole life on hold to work in a dead-end job just to look after you? I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t want this burden. But I’m stuck here now, and I’m trying to make the best of the situation.”
Miles could have left it there, but the momentum carried him forward. There was still more to get off his chest.
He was so worked up he hadn’t noticed that Shae had fallen silent. She had never seen him erupt like this. Her brother was almost robotic in the way he managed to keep his emotions in check, no matter how bad things got.
“If you have a problem with how I’m handling things, you’re free to leave. You and Clea and all your hippie friends can go live in a commune somewhere for all I care. It’s your life, do what you like.”
Miles stormed out of the room. He slammed the door behind him, doing his own impersonation of a stroppy teenager.
Miles went from room to room looking for Clea. It was time for that long-overdue discussion.
He heard Neil’s voice as he passed the laundry.
“Democracy sounds like a nice idea,” Neil said, “but it’s something I’ve yet to experience. The puppet masters allow us to think we all have a voice and that we’re all in control of our own lives. But the truth is, most people are simply marionettes controlled by a handful of obscenely wealthy white men. They trick everyone into believing that they can think for themselves, but it’s just mass-scale mind control. The media and the advertisers manipulate people in a way that is truly terrifying. Only a select few are aware of this, and so the politicians and the corporations do whatever they can to silence people like you and me.”
Miles looked inside and saw Clea sitting on top of the washing machine and hanging on Neil’s every word. She was so enraptured that he almost hesitated to interrupt. The feeling quickly passed.
“Clea, a word please?”
“Hey Miles, have you met Neil?”
“Now.”
The forcefulness of Miles’ voice caught Clea by surprise. They stepped out into the backyard, away from the rest of the party.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“What the hell were you thinking, giving Shae drugs?”
“Drugs, Miles?” Clea snort-laughed. “She just smoked a little weed, okay?”
“No, that’s not okay!”
“Miles, relax. She wanted to try some, and so we let her have a couple of tokes. That was it.”
“What the hell is wrong with you? She’s a minor!”
“Calm down. You’re turning this into a bigger thing than it needs to be. She had one or two puffs on a joint. It went straight to her head, so we didn’t give her any more. I put her in her room so she could sleep it off.”
“What made you think it was a good idea to give her some in the first place?”
“Look, I figured if she’s going to try it then it’s better if she does it in a safe place with people she can trust, rather than at some party where she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“That is not your decision to make, Clea. Shae is my sister, she’s the only family I have, and I’m the one responsible for her. Not you. She’s not some mascot that you and your friends can keep around to make you all feel younger.”
Clea took a breath. She had never seen Miles this upset. It occurred to her that she had never even heard him raise his voice. She made sure to speak in a calm, measured tone, in the hope that he would do likewise.
“I understand that you’re angry,” she said, “but I think you’re overreacting.”
“I come home to find my fifteen-year-old sister passed out in her room, in a house full of strange men. No, I don’t think I’m overreacting.”
Clea threw up her hands in defeat. “Okay, I don’t like where this is going. If you want to talk about this once you’ve calmed down, we can do that. But I’m done here.”
Clea turned to walk away. Miles grabbed her by the arm, an act of impulse that took them both by surprise.
“No, I’m not finished–”
“What the hell kind of people do you think we are, Miles?” Clea snapped. Now it was her turn for indignation. “If you think for a second that any of my friends would lay a finger on Shae, or that I’d allow anything like that happen, then you’re more of a jerk than I ever gave you credit for.”
Clea stormed back into the house. More doors were slammed.
It was dark by the time Elliott left the Dead Rite building and headed back to his car. It had been a long and eventful day, but he wasn’t tired. He was brimming with enthusiasm and nervous energy, and he could barely wait to start on the job out at Graves Ends job tomorrow morning. He had a feeling of cautious optimism, and a firm belief that things were finally starting to look up for him.
The past couple of weeks had been tough. His life had become one giant rollercoaster of emotions. He had lost his job and his girlfriend on the same day, and then became a figure of hate for millions of people on the internet thanks to the footage of him beating up Zombie Trent. People were now shouting abuse at him on the street, and the Tribe of Zeroes had burnt an effigy of him at a recent protest rally. He’d lost count of the number of death threats he’d received.
He’d also received messages of support from numerous anti-zombie groups that had adopted him as their poster child and set up fan pages in his honour. To them he was a hero, and they rallied behind him to fight this terrible injustice that he had suffered. This actually disturbed him more than the death threats; these “supporters” were not the kind of people Elliott really wanted to be associated with.
Perhaps his biggest regret was that his actions had almost cost Steve and Adam their business. He had a lot to make up for, and was hoping this job would go some way to
wards doing that.
He crossed the street and fished around in his pocket for his car keys.
A scrawny youth emerged from out of the shadows. He was dressed in dark clothing, his face hidden beneath his hooded jacket. Elliott tensed up slightly, but he tried not to let it show. He was caught off-guard by the way he seemed to appear from out of nowhere, and the fact that he was wearing a jacket in the middle of summer, but the logical part of his brain assured him that he had nothing to be afraid of. It was probably just some bored kid with a couple of hours to waste.
He averted his gaze to avoid any unnecessary eye contact, and relaxed slightly when he passed without incident.
If he had made eye contact, he would have noticed that the youth had a red bandana covering the lower half of his face. And that may have prepared him for what came next.
He heard footsteps rapidly approaching as he reached his vehicle. He turned and saw another hooded youth, a taller heavyset guy, charging straight for him. Elliott didn’t have time to react. He was shoved hard into the side of the car, then forced down onto the ground.
“Hey, hey ... easy, man,” Elliott said, making it clear that he was offering no resistance. “If you want my money, just take it.” He was carrying about seven dollars in change on him, and he wasn’t about to risk his life over it.
“Don’t say another word,” the attacker said coldly.
Everything from that point on happened so fast that he barely had time to make sense of it all.
He remembered feeling a heavy weight on his back when his attacker pushed his knee in between his shoulder blades.
Then the skinny youth crouching down in front of him.
He remembered freezing when he felt something sharp pressed up against his neck. Something like the tip of a knife.
And the feeling of overwhelming dread and despair that washed over him upon realising what it actually was. It wasn’t a knife. It was something smaller, like a bee sting.
Or a needle.
The Dead Rite staff had been warned about the possibility of attacks by members of the public. None of them had ever experienced it first-hand, but they’d all heard stories of UMC workers being spat on or assaulted.
The most disturbing reports came from overseas, where the French resistance group ZLF were said to inject UMC workers and prominent anti-zombie figures with infected blood. This caused the victim to slowly transform into an undead being, an agonising process that could take anywhere between a couple of hours to a week or more.
But that was something that only ever happened in other countries. It had never happened here.
Until now.
When he realised what was happening, Elliott thrashed around like he was possessed by demons, fighting to free himself from their clutches. He managed to swat the needle away, and his two attackers struggled to hold him down to finish the job. Elliott wasn’t about to go down without a fight.
Out of nowhere, a van tore around the corner and screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. The two attackers left Elliott and quickly jumped inside.
“Consider this your karma, fascist,” the skinny one shouted at Elliott. “You won’t be bashing any more zombies now, yeah?”
The door slammed shut, and the van disappeared into the night.
Elliott remained on the side of the road for some time. He just laid there, staring up at the full moon hovering in the night sky above him. He should have guessed that something like this would happen. As soon as his life looked like taking a turn for the better, this came along. It was another great big cosmic joke at his expense.
The syringe full of zombie blood was in the gutter, a few metres away. Elliott eventually climbed to his feet to dispose of it correctly, to prevent some other innocent person from accidentally infecting themselves.
He held the syringe up in front of the street light to see how much blood was left. It was nearly full; only a small amount had been expelled. But that didn’t matter. All it took was for one drop of toxic blood to get into your system, and that was it. Elliott had been handed a death sentence. He was an undead man walking. He could almost feel the poisonous fluid as it contaminated his bloodstream and turned him into a ticking time bomb.
Later on that night, and in the days following, Elliott replayed the incident over and over in his mind. He could think of little else. He never quite understood why he had been so passive throughout the whole thing, and how he had just accepted it and let it happen. He put up virtually no resistance, and just let them do whatever they wanted to him.
There was this one recurring image that kept haunting him. He was lying face down on the concrete, with the fat guy’s knee in his back and the skinny guy’s shoes inches away from his nose. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t know what it meant, but he kept seeing that one particular item of footwear in his mind, over and over. Sneakers that almost glowed under the refraction of the streetlight.
They were a pair of neon red Nikes with bright orange swooshes.
The party continued until the early hours of the morning. Thanks to what had transpired earlier in the evening, Miles had zero chance of getting a decent night’s sleep.
Had he overreacted? Or was he taking it all out on Clea for the way she had supplanted him as Shae’s cool older sibling? That definitely wasn’t his role anymore. Shae used to idolise Miles when she was younger. Now he was the authority figure for her to rebel against. Miles had to be her father, mother and older brother rolled into one.
He found himself growing more protective of Shae as she got older, at a time when she was craving more independence. She was just doing what all kids did at her age, which was to test her boundaries and see how much she could get away with. He knew that it wasn’t the end of the world if she had a couple of sneaky puffs on a joint. It would be far worse if he let her grow up without any rules and allowed her to do whatever she wanted.
He remembered the time his parents went ballistic at him when he was sixteen and came home drunk from a party. At the time, he vowed that when Shae was his age he’d be the older brother that he wished he’d had, the type that would drive her and her friends around when they needed a lift, and buy the occasional six pack when she asked. But circumstances intervened, and he never got the chance to do any of that. Instead of being the one who would allow her the odd indulgence, he was the one who had to say no to everything. It was only now that he understood what he put his parents through at that age. He wondered how they ever coped with him.
Chapter 19