There were moments in life when all the planning and preparation you may have done simply goes out the window, and success comes down to dumb luck and being in the right place at the right time. The early bird may catch the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese. This was one such moment.
The Dead Rite crew would have hoisted Felix onto their shoulders and chaired him home if they had the energy to do it. His brilliant new zombie lure-and-trap strategy had worked wonders, and had made them all considerably richer in the process. Everyone was unanimous in their belief that he was both a genius and a hero.
The second day at Graves End finally wrapped up at around 8:30 p.m. Even though they were all exhausted, no one wanted to stop working, and Steve only called it a day once he’d decided it was getting too dark to continue.
In total, nine busloads were filled for the day. That equated to over seven hundred zombies, or $350,000 in revenue. The job they initially thought might take seven to ten days to complete could now be over as early as tomorrow morning.
Needless to say, the mood on the bus ride home was a lot more buoyant than the previous day. The workers were all keeping mental tallies of how many zombies had been brought in, and how much money they’d be earning from this job. They were also thinking about what they’d be spending all that money on.
One by one, they discussed what they would be doing with their impending windfalls.
Marcus spoke of his plans to rave his way around the world. He was going to spend the next year travelling from festival to festival, partying with the superstar SlamCore DJs like some sort of techno Grateful Dead groupie.
Erin said she would pay off her credit card debts, then put a down payment on that Volkswagen Beetle convertible she’d literally had her eye on for the past year.
Felix had no definite plans about how he’d be spending his cash other than to say that he could triple it in one weekend at the casino thanks to a foolproof system he’d devised that could beat the house without drawing any attention to himself.
When it came to Miles, he said he hadn’t really given any thought about what he’d be spending his money on. After some cajoling from his coworkers, he eventually came up with buying a new car so he would finally be able to give up public transport.
The truth was that he knew exactly how he would be spending his money, but it wouldn’t be on anything flashy or ostentatious. He would use it to pay off a large chunk of the mortgage. This would give him some much-needed breathing space, and relieve some of the crushing pressure he felt financially. He could also finally start his commerce degree, and he would have enough in the bank to be able to study full-time and work part-time, rather than the other way around.
Then it was Adam’s turn. He said that once Dead Rite had paid off the fine and all their debts, there would still be enough leftover to trade in the minibus and finally upgrade to a newer model. This news was met with a loud cheer of approval from the staff, who were all well and truly sick of travelling to and from jobs in an unreliable rusty old Winnebago.
A few minutes later, the minibus passed the stone cottage at the top of the hill that Adam had fallen in love with. He knew what he would really love to do with all that money, but for now that would have to remain a fantasy.
Elliott was the only one who didn’t contribute to the discussion. He sat up the front of the bus and rested his head against the window. The others left him alone and assumed he was just exhausted after a long day’s work. A few of them had noticed that he had been oddly quiet these past couple of days, but they put this down to the high level of stress he had been under lately.
The events of the past twelve hours were still buzzing through Miles’ head as he left Dead Rite’s headquarters and caught the train home. He had so many thoughts and emotions swimming inside his mind it was overwhelming. After enduring endless setbacks and disappointments over the past couple of years, today felt like a turning point in his life.
He passed a liquor store on his way home from the train station. He wondered if he might need a couple of quiet drinks to help calm down after such an exhilarating day. It didn’t take long to convince himself that this was an exceptionally wise idea. He usually abstained from alcohol when he had to work the next day, but he justified it this one time by saying that a drink or two would help him wind down and allow him to have a better night’s sleep. This was just being sensible – it wasn’t a celebration. Not yet, anyway.
He paid for his bottle of vodka and headed for the exit.
The automatic doors opened, and he found himself standing face to face with Campbell.
“Miles,” Campbell said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“Oh, hey Campbell,” Miles said, caught slightly off-guard.
Miles hadn’t seen Campbell since he unexpectedly quit Dead Rite a month earlier. Now here he was, running into him as he purchased liquor at 10:00 p.m. on a weeknight. It probably wasn’t a good look, but at that moment Miles didn’t really care too much what Campbell thought of him.
“How’s life at Z-Pro?” Miles said, struggling to make small talk.
“Oh, you know. Same circus, different clowns.”
Miles noticed how drastically Campbell had altered his appearance in the short time he had been with Z-Pro. He wore a bright pink polo shirt with the collar popped. His hair was dripping with gel, and a triangular patch of facial hair had appeared on his lower lip. His left arm was covered entirely in tattoos, and he had the beginnings of a sleeve on his right. He was slowly turning into another clone. It was as if Z-Pro gave their staff douchebag pills upon commencement of employment.
“What about Dead Rite?” Campbell said. “We haven’t seen you guys around much these past few days.”
Miles hesitated. Did Campbell know something? There was something in the tone of his voice that made it sound like he already knew the answer.
“Just another one of our quiet periods, I suppose,” Miles shrugged.
Campbell grinned and nodded in a way that Miles couldn’t decide was sympathetic or patronising.
“You know, there’s a rumour going around about some mysterious outfit bringing in truckload after truckload of zombies in a bus that looks exactly like one of ours.”
“Really?” Miles did his best to feign surprise.
“You know anything about that?”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Miles was certain something was up with Campbell. This friendly catch-up now felt more like an interrogation.
He excused himself at the first available opportunity and quickly left the store.
He crossed the road without looking back, but had the unsettling feeling that Campbell was still watching him. He walked up the street a bit further, then ducked into a nearby shopfront.
That was definitely a weird encounter. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Campbell knew more than he was letting on. When Miles first ran into him as he was leaving the store, Campbell didn’t look the least bit surprised to see him there. It was as if he was waiting for him. Did he follow him there? Campbell didn’t live anywhere near this neighbourhood, so it didn’t seem like a chance encounter.
Miles told himself to calm down, and that he was probably reading too much into the incident. Paranoia was just an inevitable side-effect from doing something illegal. It was completely normal, beneficial even, to be suspicious of everyone under these circumstances.
The liquor store’s automatic doors opened again a minute later, and Campbell emerged empty-handed. He looked down the street, in the direction where Miles would usually be walking home. He couldn’t see anyone. He slowly turned around, scoping out the whole area. He was definitely looking for someone.
Miles observed this from across the road, hidden in the shadows of this unlit shopfront. He felt a little better knowing that he hadn’t imagined that whole strange episode, and his suspicions about Campbell were wholly justified.
Miles could sense the celebratory atmosphere permeating from withi
n his house from two blocks away. The party was in full swing, with hundreds of Zeroes converging on the place. Under normal circumstances he would regard this as a complete nightmare, but after the incredible day he’d had it really didn’t bother him that much – although he realised his chances of a pleasant night’s sleep were now fairly slim.
He navigated his way through the assorted revelers and hangers-on milling about inside the house, then past the fire-twirlers and sitar players outside, eventually finding Amoeba holding court in the backyard.
“What's going on here?” he asked.
“Tonight,” Amoeba declared triumphantly, “we celebrate the coming of age for the Tribe of Zeroes!”
A cheer went up among the assembled throng.
Tariq the Anarchist raised his beer in victory. “Today we showed Bernard Marlowe exactly who’s in control,” he said. “The ruling elite ain’t runnin’ the country – the people run the country!”
A louder cheer rang out.
“Go inside and turn on the TV,” Amoeba told Miles. “It’s all over the news.”
“You should have seen it, man,” one of the other Zeroes cackled. “Marlowe hightailed it out of there like a scared little bitch!”
“This is just the beginning!” Mai added, showing more life and energy than many thought she was capable of. “Remember this day, because today is Day One of the revolution!”
Tariq started a chant of “Ann-Arr-Key! Ann-Arr-Key!” Before long, the whole crowd had joined in.
Miles escaped to his bedroom and switched the TV on, happy to be away from that gathering of weirdos.
The report about the Zeroes disrupting Marlowe’s speech came six minutes into the news bulletin – Amoeba may have been exaggerating slightly when he said it was “all over the news”. It was preceded by a number of puff pieces regarding the day’s election campaign. There was Marlowe reading to school children, Marlowe meeting small business owners, Marlowe shaking hands with pensioners in shopping centres, Marlowe touring a factory in a hard hat and high-visibility vest, and various other heavily stage managed public appearances.
The disruption at the party conference was covered only briefly, with the news anchor stating that Marlowe’s speech had been gatecrashed by “the now-obligatory rent-a-crowd dead-heads” that had been stalking Marlowe since his campaign for Prime Minister began.
The accompanying vision showed a slight commotion taking place in the auditorium, with the Zeroes being chased out by security, and then Marlowe on stage seemingly carrying on with his speech.
“This country will not be held to ransom by extremists and those on the lunatic fringe!” Marlowe boldly declared. “Together, we will emerge victorious in the war on horror!”
This was followed by a standing ovation.
Miles chuckled to himself and shook his head with bemused wonder. It was obvious, to him at least, what was going on here. With the help of some creative editing and shifting around of the chronology of events, the tone of the piece was altered completely. Instead of showing Marlowe running from the auditorium and into the safety of his limousine, a cut-and-paste job had made him appear strong and defiant in the face of a bunch of unruly troublemakers.
And so that, it appeared, was the Zeroes’ big moment. The one that Fabian believed would change the course of history ended up being nothing more than an undergraduate prank. A damp squib of a statement that earned them ninety seconds of airtime and a paragraph or two in tomorrow’s edition of The Daily Ink, but would be all but forgotten in a week’s time.
Miles switched the TV off and reached for the bottle of vodka.
By 12:45 a.m., one-third of the bottle was gone but sleep still eluded him. The music continued to blare outside, and the Zeroes’ party was showing no signs of winding down.
At 12:58 a.m. he climbed out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom. He opened a drawer under the sink and retrieved the Ambien he’d swiped from the house at Graves End the previous day. The label warned against combining the pills with alcohol, but he figured that only applied to the elderly. Besides, he hadn’t really had all that much to drink.
He swallowed one pill with a mouthful of water. He swallowed a second pill when he remembered that he was about twice the size of the old lady, and would therefore require twice the dosage for the pills to have any real effect.
He heard a phone ringing. It was a buzzing sound, coming from the powder blue pantsuit Clea had left among a pile of clothes on the floor near the tub. He crouched down and fished it out of her jacket pocket.
He took the phone and stumbled around the house looking for Clea, but she was nowhere to be found. One of the Zeroes, a short guy with a moustache wearing a sarong and a cowboy hat, told him he thought he saw her out the back somewhere.
Miles spotted Clea in a dark corner of the backyard, talking with Neil underneath the lemon tree. He took a few steps closer and saw that they were doing a lot more than just talking. They were all over one another like a couple of hormonally-charged teenagers at a high school disco.
“Oops, sorry,” he said, but it soon became apparent that Miles’ presence hadn’t even registered with them. It was dark, the music was pumping, and Clea and Neil were far too interested in each other to notice anyone else.
Miles quickly retreated to the house to give them some privacy, before backtracking. A sinister thought crept into his mind.
He flipped Clea’s phone open, hit the record button, and filmed her and Neil in action.
It felt kind of sleazy to be doing this, like he was some sort of creepy voyeur, but by this stage of the night everyone was pretty much wasted. No one paid any attention to him, and in the context of what else was going on around him it didn’t even seem that out of the ordinary.
He filmed Clea and Neil groping and devouring each other for about two minutes, then searched through Clea’s contacts list. He found Fabian’s phone number and sent him the video.
Miles couldn’t wipe the devious grin from his face. He knew that Fabian was in love with Clea, and that he hated Neil. He also knew that what he had just done was pretty nasty and vindictive. But it was also too good an opportunity to pass up. Besides, after the footage that Fabian shot at the processing centre and all the trouble that had caused, they could now call it even.
Miles returned to his room and crawled back into bed, feeling oddly proud of himself. His clock radio now displayed 1:14 a.m. He closed his eyes.
He opened them again a few minutes later, or after what felt like a few minutes. Someone or something was thumping around outside his room. He heard muffled voices, and what sounded like an argument. The door handle jiggled, like they were trying to get in.
He glanced at his clock and saw it was now 6:01 a.m. He tried lifting his head up, but he could barely move. His left arm was numb after falling asleep on it and cutting off the circulation.
The next thing he knew, the door was kicked open and he was pounced on by two men clad in black.
The men held him face down, pressing on his neck and twisting his arms behind his back. He felt a sharp pain around his wrists as they were bound together tightly with cable ties.
His first thought was that he was being robbed, until he began to decipher some of the unintelligible shouting coming from the men. He picked out the occasional word, like “police” and “remain silent”.
They pulled him to his feet and dragged him out the door. He was paralysed by both the fear and the Ambien, so he offered no resistance. They hauled his limp body outside and dumped him on the front lawn.
A million different scenarios raced through his mind. The first and most obvious one was that none of this was happening, and it was all a dream brought on by foolishly combining alcohol with medication that wasn’t prescribed for him. This was all just a dream. A crazy, vivid, terrifying dream. That was the best-case scenario. Or the worst-case, considering the frightening possibility that he had given himself brain damage and might never fully emerge back into reality.
/> His next thought was that he was under arrest for the Graves End job. Campbell had found out about it and informed Jack Houston, who then reported it to the authorities. That had to be it. Miles was losing his job, Dead Rite would be shut down, and they would all probably end up in jail. He could see no other plausible explanation.
He laid there on his side on the cold damp grass, still trapped in a partial paralysis, the cable ties digging into his skin. He struggled to make sense of any of it. He also had the overwhelming urge to scratch his nose.
It took him a few minutes to unscramble his thoughts and think it through logically, but he was eventually able to recognise that it was the Zeroes, not him, the cops were focusing their attention on.
Each of the Zeroes was being dragged away from their sleeping quarters with their hands tied. Most were only half-dressed, and a few were wearing even less than that. Some, like Mai, went kicking and screaming, thrashing around like a wind-up toy. Others, like Tariq the Anarchist, went to pieces, terrified when confronted with a small dose of actual anarchy.
Only Neil seemed unfazed by any of this. He stood back and observed proceedings as they unfolded. Strangely, the police made no move to apprehend him.
In the midst of his confused and incapacitated state, Miles was struck by a sudden moment of clarity: it must have been Neil who ratted out the Zeroes. That had to be the case. After all, why wasn’t he being arrested along with all the others?
He saw Neil whisper something into the ear of one of the cops and point in Miles’ direction. The cop then came over and cut the cable ties from around his wrists.
As soon as his hands were free, his nose stopped itching.
“You’re free to go,” the cop said. “We apologise for the inconvenience.”
Miles wanted to ask what the hell was going on, but his mouth had trouble expressing what his brain was thinking. By the time he was lucid enough to formulate a complete sentence, the cop was long gone.
He struggled to his feet and walked off, rubbing his wrists along the way.
He was still none the wiser as to what was happening here. Was Neil a snitch? It didn’t really seem like the kind of thing he’d do. Neil was more hardcore than anyone else in the group. He was someone who had chained himself to bulldozers and stormed the headquarters of big oil companies to dump dead wildlife on the CEO’s desk. Unlike many of the others who spent their days getting stoned and talking about what should be done, he actually backed his words up with actions. Maybe Neil had been caught doing something serious and, staring down the barrel of a lengthy prison sentence, rolled over on his collaborators.
It wasn’t until much later, when Miles had the chance to give it some proper thought, that he was able to figure out what the real story was. Neil was far too relaxed and composed to be a snitch. He looked and behaved like a totally different person. The way he spoke, the way he acted, his posture and body language – it was completely at odds with the person they all knew.
And then it hit him. It was so obvious, Miles couldn’t believe it had taken him this long to figure it out.
Neil was an undercover cop. His entire persona was a fabrication.
Miles had laughed at Clea when she suggested that spies could be sent in to infiltrate groups like the Zeroes. He never believed it, and assumed it was just Clea living in her own paranoid fantasy world. It seemed that Clea didn’t quite believe it either, otherwise she may have been a bit more selective about who she let into the group. He wasn’t sure what the screening process was for joining the Zeroes, but in Neil’s case it seemed that chiselled good looks and stories about all his crazy adventures were enough to gain admission.
Miles returned to bed and enjoyed another four wonderful hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep.
And then the minibus drove over a pothole, and Miles was jolted out of his nocturnal wonderland. It was a callous reminder that he wasn’t actually in his warm and inviting bed; instead, he was drifting in and out of consciousness on the bus ride back out to Graves End. The sleeping pills maintained a firm grip on him and caused him to periodically zone out. He would close his eyes for a second or two, and then realise twenty minutes had gone by when he opened them again. His body may have been awake, but his brain kept telling him he should go back to sleep. He wished the trip was longer so he could have more time to rest. What he was experiencing now felt a hundred times worse than being hungover.
It occurred to him that taking those pills might not have been one of his brightest ideas. Combining them with alcohol was even more foolish. Miles cursed his idiocy. He knew he shouldn’t have done it, but he did it anyway. For some reason he always insisted on finding these things out the hard way.
He rested his head against the window and took a deep breath.
Steve kept a close eye on Miles as he drove. When he first laid eyes on him that morning, he looked so pale and wrecked that he wondered if he was hiding a zombie bite.
He also kept a close watch on the rear view mirror. It may have just been his imagination, but he was positive that same silver Jeep had been following them for the last twenty minutes.
“Hey, Miles?”
Miles felt someone tugging at his arm. He groaned softly and turned away from whoever it was that was bugging him.
“Miles?” Erin said. “Wake up”.
“I am awake.”
“Miles!”
Miles opened his eyes – and discovered that he was no longer on the bus. He was outside. In front of a house. Leaning up against a tree.
“Were you asleep just then?” Erin said.
“What?” He blinked a few times, hoping he didn’t look as bad as he felt. “Um, no.”
“I just called your name three times?”
“I only closed my eyes for a second.”
“You’ve been leaning against that tree for ten minutes now?”
“I ... what?”
“Are you feeling alright?”
“I’m fine,” Miles said, although he wasn’t terribly convincing as he said this.
“You’ve been acting kind of strange all morning?”
“I’m just a little tired, that’s all.” He nodded toward the house. “So are we going to make a start on this or what?”
“No,” Erin replied. “We’ve already done this address. I’m trying to tell you that it’s time to move on to the next one?”
“Oh, right,” Miles said. “I knew that.”
For the rest of that morning, Miles would search through every bathroom in every house, on the hunt for any pharmaceutical assistance to help wake up. Ritalin, Adderall, pseudoephedrine, caffeine pills, trucker speed – anything that might give him a boost.
He finally came across a bottle of cheap diet pills inside a woman’s purse. Judging by the mu-mu wearing zombie heffalump who the purse belonged to, they didn’t appear to be all that useful as a weight-loss supplement. But they would have to do, or at least until something better came along.
Even though he had earlier promised himself that stealing from homes was just a one-off thing, he considered these to be extraordinary circumstances.
He swallowed six pills and stashed the remainder of the bottle in his pocket.
Chapter 23