“Tell him not to do me any favors,” I mutter, faking a yawn, and I love it when Kinslow bristles and shoots me an evil look.
The tour continues. The rest of the rooms seem uninteresting after the lab, until we come to the nursery. I know that’s what it is because the word is painted in blood, in large letters, over the door. I expect Mr. Dowling to say something at this point, but he just pushes in as if it’s the same as all the other rooms.
There are several sections to the nursery. We first enter a room full of cribs, all sorts of designs and sizes. Most are vacant, though I spot a few of the fanged, white-eyed, pint-sized monstrosities at rest. Their mouths move softly as I pass, each of them whispering the same word, “mummy.”
The next room is full of toys. Soft dolls, beautifully carved houses, replicas of cars and guns, model planes hanging from the ceiling, mobiles, carousels, inflatables, jigsaw puzzles, board games. It’s like an Aladdin’s cave for very young children.
“Stunning, isn’t it?” Kinslow says.
“There’s too much,” I croak, head spinning as I look around. “I can’t take it all in. The babies must go wild in here.”
“Actually they’ve no interest in toys. Mr. Dowling put the collection together because he thinks it would be good for the babies to play, but they ignore every toy he’s ever brought. That distresses him. He wants them to have fun, but their brains don’t work that way and he hasn’t been able to refocus them, as hard as he’s tried.”
“Well, that’s the trouble with breeding a crop of savage rug rats,” I murmur.
Kinslow nods glumly. “He keeps trying to introduce an element of play into their genetic code, but I doubt he’ll succeed. They’re a solemn bunch.”
“He should have let them hang out with Dan-Dan,” I say sourly. “There was a killer who knew all about play.”
We push through a door into a classroom. Scores of the eerie babies are sitting in rows around a teacher, staring at her expressionlessly as she holds up large pictures for them.
“Repeat after me,” the teacher says. “A is for apple.”
“a is for apple,” they whisper.
She puts the picture aside and picks up another. “A is for ape.”
“a is for ape.”
She nods and picks up a picture of a killing field, bodies ripped apart, guts everywhere, blood soaking into the ground. “A is for atrocity,” she sings.
“a is for atrocity,” the babies repeat.
“Very good,” she purrs.
I stare at the teacher with shock. It’s not the pictures that stun me, or the way she holds the attention of the little monsters so artfully. It’s the fact that I recognize her, that I’ve sat in a classroom with her before and had her lecture me in much the same way as she’s now dealing with the babies.
Nudging forward, I raise a hand as if asking a question in class in the old days. (Not that I asked many questions back then.) The teacher appraises me coolly, then purses her lips and nods.
“Yes, Miss Smith?” she gurgles, her voice deeper and more cracked than it used to be. “Can I help you?”
I clear my throat, lower my hand, gape at the teacher for another few seconds, then wheeze incredulously, “Mrs. Reed?”
NINE
The last time I saw my old principal, Mrs. Reed, she was tucking into the brain of another of my teachers. I’ve hardly considered her since then, although, now that I cast my thoughts back, I remember being confused because she was eating brains even though she wasn’t a zombie. Now it’s clear she was on her way to bigger and better things.
Ironically, when I met Vinyl in Hammersmith before we headed for New Kirkham, he suggested the possibility that she might have gotten a job teaching zombies, but he was only joking. Looks like the joke was on him in the end.
Mrs. Reed’s silver hair looks much the same as always, and she’s wearing her customary black cape and thin-rimmed glasses. But her skin is mottled, purple in places. Her eyes are a dull yellow color. Her teeth are black and some have fallen out, along with her fingernails. She’s a mutant like Kinslow.
“You’d started to turn on the morning of the zombie attack,” I mutter.
“Yes,” she says primly. “I had been informed of the plan to unleash the zombie virus and I chose that day to commit myself completely to Mr. Dowling’s cause.”
“You guys have to eat brains too?” I ask, looking from her to Kinslow.
“They’re not as essential to us as they are to your kind,” Kinslow answers. “But yeah, we have to top up every so often to keep body and soul together.” He touches a bit of loose flesh on his right cheek and pushes it back into place. “I know we look bad, but we’d be a hell of a lot worse if we abstained from brains.”
I stare at Mrs. Reed and she arches an eyebrow at me. “Say what is on your mind, Miss Smith.”
“You were in league with them all along,” I accuse her. “You knew what was going to happen. You let zombies invade our school and slaughter your students.”
“I did what I felt was right,” she says calmly. “I have no regrets.”
“We wanted someone there to observe you,” Kinslow explains. “We’ve had an operative at every school you ever attended.”
“Looks like you can’t trust anyone these days,” I growl. “I thought you’d have been happier in Battersea Power Station, that you’d throw in your lot with Vicky Wedge and her bigoted crowd.”
Mrs. Reed tuts. “Don’t be dense, girl. That was a charade.”
I stare at her with surprise. “You’re not a racist?”
“Certainly not. I acted that way in order to get closer to your father and thus to you. He was a vile creature. I hope he got what was coming to him when the zombies ran riot.”
“Don’t diss my dad, you mutant bitch,” I snap. “He was twice the person you were. At least he didn’t feed a load of kids who were under his care to zombies.”
“Those children meant nothing to me,” Mrs. Reed says, unfazed by my outburst. “Fodder for the undead. Unimportant in the grand scheme of things. These were the only children I ever cared about.”
She looks at the babies and smiles. They’re all staring at her as they were when I first came in. They haven’t even glanced at me.
“Lynne has been invaluable,” Kinslow says. “She has an amazing bond with the babies. They won’t pay attention to most teachers, but they like her.”
“No,” Mrs. Reed corrects him. “They respect me.”
Mr. Dowling glides forward, cruising through the ranks of babies, stroking their heads and beaming at them. Each looks up when touched and smiles briefly at him, then returns its attention to the teacher.
The clown’s voice echoes in my head as he addresses the infants. “Good babies. Who loves you?”
“you do daddy,” they reply.
“And Mummy,” he tells them. “Mummy loves you too.”
“mummy?” the children whisper.
“B is for ball,” Mrs. Reed chants.
“b is for ball,” they instantly reply.
“B is for beach.”
“b is for beach.”
“And B is for… Becky Smith!” she finishes with a flourish, waving an arm at me like a magician producing a rabbit.
Every baby’s head snaps round and their tiny, eerie faces light up. “mummy,” they croon. “you came to see us mummy. we love you mummy. sit with us. stay with us forever.”
The baby with the hole in its head, the one from Timothy’s place on Brick Lane, gets up and races across. I can’t see its feet beneath its gown. It stops just ahead of me and holds up both arms. “a is for apple mummy,” it says proudly.
“Yeah,” I grunt. “And A is for my arse, which you can all kiss if you think I’m going to stay and play mother to a pack of clay-faced freaks.”
The baby stares at me blankly.
“We will not have language like that in my class,” Mrs. Reed thunders.
“What are you gonna do about it?” I jeer. “M
ake me sit on the naughty step?”
My ex-principal advances angrily and raises a hand to slap me. Before she can, the babies leap to their feet, their eyes glowing a dark red color. They snarl at her, showing their fangs, and bunch together between her and me.
Mrs. Reed draws to a startled halt and her jaw drops.
“Withdraw, Lynne,” Kinslow advises her quietly. “We won’t be able to stop them if they attack.”
“They’ve never threatened me before,” Mrs. Reed bleats, taking a trembling step away from me and lowering her arm. “They’re my students. They respect me. We have a close relationship.”
“Yeah,” Kinslow says, “but they’re B’s children. You know what they say about blood being thicker than–”
“They’re not my bloody children,” I shout. “Why do you keep saying that these horrible, vicious freaks are mine?”
“Because they are,” someone murmurs behind me.
And I turn to find myself facing the bulging potbelly of the towering, smirking, bug-eyed Owl Man.
TEN
“I should have known you’d turn up like a bad smell sooner or later,” I sneer.
“Becky,” he says, making a pained expression. “Surely you could come up with something more cutting than that old cliché.”
“You’re not worth the effort of an original put-down,” I sniff, and look for his sidekicks, Sakarias and Rage, but he seems to be alone. “Where’s your dog and the big galoot?”
“I left them with Dan-Dan’s darlings,” Owl Man says. “I thought you might appreciate it if they guided the traumatized children to safety.”
I make a growling noise, then force myself to spit out a very spiteful “Thanks.”
Mr. Dowling and Kinslow aren’t surprised to see Owl Man, but I am. I knew he was working with the clown in one capacity or another, but I didn’t think they were on such good terms that he could waltz into Mr. Dowling’s secret base any time he pleased.
“Will you ask the babies to sit?” Owl Man purrs. “I think they’re close to ripping Mrs. Reed limb from limb.”
I cast my gaze over the babies. Their eyes are still glowing red and they haven’t retracted their fangs.
“Maybe I want them to tear her apart,” I murmur, enjoying the way she stiffens fearfully.
“It makes no difference to me,” Owl Man says with a careless shrug, moving to the front of the classroom and leaning against the old-style desk.
“Can’t Mr. Dowling call them off?” I ask.
“Of course,” Owl Man says. “But he seems happy to cede authority to you in this instance.”
It’s true. The clown barely seems to have acknowledged Owl Man’s presence or Mrs. Reed’s predicament. He’s studying a map of the world, head cocked sideways, prodding a finger at different countries, as if trying to figure out where we are.
“It’s okay,” I tell the babies, relenting. “The old bat is harmless. Let her be.”
“b,” the babies echo, taking their places again, eyes fading from red to white. “b is for bat. b is for becky smith. b is for mummy.”
“Quit saying that,” I mutter, then sit among the babies. The one with the hole in its head nestles up to me and I pull it close like a doll. I know it was responsible for Timothy’s death, but I don’t think there was any deliberate malice in what it did. Timothy found it with a spike sticking through its head. It must have been in agony, maybe terrified, assuming these strange creatures can feel terror. When I pulled out the spike, it called for the zombies because it needed help and was lonely and scared, not because it wanted to kill my friend.
Or so I like to think. “The clown promised me answers,” I tell Owl Man. “I’m guessing you’ve come to supply them.”
“I certainly can if that is what he wishes.” Owl Man looks to Mr. Dowling for confirmation. The clown gives no outward sign that he’s paying attention, but he must transmit something mentally, because Owl Man nods. “Very well. And you are happy for me to speak in front of the teacher?”
This time Mr. Dowling does look round. He stares at Mrs. Reed as if seeing her for the first time, then his voice comes to me inside my head. “Will I kill her for you, Becky?”
“No,” I answer quickly. “There’s no need to do that.”
Mrs. Reed trembles as she realizes that her life is hanging in the balance. Mr. Dowling stares at her a moment longer, then waves a dismissive hand and returns his attention to the map.
“If you’ll pardon me awhile…” Mrs. Reed says weakly and hurries from the room, pausing only to glare at me before she exits, blaming me for the aggressive actions of Mr. Dowling and the babies.
“I’m glad you spared her,” Kinslow says. “She’d have been hard to replace.”
“Oh, I’m all for supporting the educational system,” I say drily, then gaze at the grinning Owl Man. “Go on. Enlighten me. I can tell you’re dying to.”
Owl Man pats his potbelly and burps softly. “Pardon me. I ate before I came, and food often repeats on me.”
“Like I give a damn about your feeding habits,” I huff. “The babies. Tell me.”
“Your wish is my command,” he says, rubbing his stomach. “The children are mutants, but a far more advanced breed than Kinslow or Mrs. Reed. They have been cloned, not transformed. Unlike the regular mutants, who started out as normal people, these have been born as they are.
“They’re remarkable creatures,” he continues as the babies stare at him the way they were staring at Mrs. Reed when she was teaching. “A miracle of modern genetics. Zombies and mutants are Neanderthals in comparison with these state-of-the-art creations. The babies are the foot soldiers of the next generation, the crop we dreamed of harvesting when we started down this long, ungodly road years ago.
“I’m not sure how much Oystein has told you about our working history, but the three of us were once a team.”
“I know about you and the doc,” I interrupt. “He told me you were his star assistant until you betrayed him and made off with a sample of Schlesinger-10. But who’s the third member?”
Owl Man blinks with surprise. “Why, Mr. Dowling of course.”
I gape at him. “You’re lying.”
“Why would I lie?” he counters.
“Dr. Oystein would never have worked with a foul monster like that,” I growl, stabbing a finger at Mr. Dowling, who takes no notice of the insult. He’s moved on from the map and is now thoughtfully chewing a piece of chalk.
“He wasn’t always this way,” Owl Man says, studying the chalk-chewing clown with what appears to be genuine pity. “He’s a genius, and there was a time when he could control himself the way you and I can.”
“The doc thinks he’s the servant of Satan,” I snap.
“He does now,” Owl Man nods. “And, for all I know, he might be correct. But there was a time when he trusted Mr. Dowling even more than he trusted me. The three of us made giant strides together. I was always the most junior of the trio, but I had a way of slotting neatly between the other two, translating their more theoretical ideas into workable practice.
“I won’t bore you with the breakup of the partnership. Oystein has his side of the story, I have mine and I’m sure Mr. Dowling has his, though he has never shared the complete tale with me. However it happened, relations shattered and we parted company acrimoniously. I have restored certain confidences over the years, as you can see by my presence here, but I doubt we’ll ever share as much as we did when we were younger and pulling in the exact same direction.”
“Interesting that you decided to go with the evil lunatic rather than the kindly doctor,” I sneer. “You showed your true colors in the end, didn’t you?”
“That is how some might see it,” Owl Man says evenly. “For my part…” He tuts. “But we need not venture down that path. I have no interest in earning your favorable opinion. Let’s focus on the babies.
“Mr. Dowling was always more interested in the mutant gene than the zombie virus. Oystein was fixated on
the undead, but Mr. Dowling was intrigued by the in-between state. Each of the scientists aided the other in his research, while I divided my time equally between the pair.
“All three of us were involved in the early development of the babies. They captured Oystein’s eye because they had the capacity to serve as an army in the war with the zombies. If we could not manufacture a virus that was capable of wiping out the undead menace, maybe we could use a semi-living force to take the battle to them.”
“Couldn’t you have used regular mutants?” I ask.
“Oystein didn’t trust them,” Owl Man says. “He thought they might form a splinter group and act against the best interests of humanity, try to gain control of the planet for themselves.”
“As they have,” I say smugly. “The doc had these creeps figured out from the very beginning.”
“Careful,” Kinslow says roughly. “I might put you over my knee and spank you if you keep offending me.”
“Not while I have my babies to protect me,” I smirk.
Kinslow’s eyes narrow but he says nothing more. He seems to be worried that the babies would actually take my side over his if push came to shove. I file that nugget away. It might come in handy when I’m trying to blow this joint later.
“We made a number of early advances,” Owl Man continues. “We hadn’t yet bred any babies, but we were not far off. Then the schism opened between us and our research on that front had to be abandoned while we retreated, recovered and regrouped.
“When Mr. Dowling returned to the matter of the babies years later, it became clear to him that they would need to be cloned. He experimented on a number of fertilized human eggs, but–”
“Pick those up at the local supermarket, did he?” I interject.
“Actually you’d get a nasty shock if I told you where they came from,” Owl Man says. “But that’s a story for another day.”
“There seem to be lots of those,” I mutter.
“More than you could imagine,” Owl Man says darkly. “Now, as I was saying, Mr. Dowling conducted experiments on ordinary human embryos, without success. The mutant gene always ran amok, destroying the developing beings. He needed to add something to the mix to combat the effects of the mutant material, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.”