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Chapter Fifteen: Curly Wurly

Latest chapter in my Zombies, Run! Fanfiction. Sorry, those of you who kindly read this, for taking so much time posting this. Work has been crazy and will continue to be but I’ll do my best to keep writing, however intermittently.

It was only after Janine had satisfied herself that I had a.) not got bitten and brought the Zombie Plague to Abel with me, b.) handed over what supplies I had been able to gather and c.) been thoroughly debriefed that I was allowed a rest.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I understand Janine, I appreciate her severe sense of order and I know that her insistence on protocol goes a long way to keeping us all safe but I’m not going to lie to you either: the woman is a freaking drill sergeant.

By the time I had had the obligatory cold wash-down and been checked for bites, I was pretty much dead on my feet. I certainly don’t know that I was able to string a coherent sentence together. Still, it was only when Dr Meyers intervened, insisting that I urgently needed rest that Janine grudgingly allowed me to repair to my tent, placing me under orders to come and see her as soon as I felt sufficiently rested.

I don’t think she appreciated what happened next. I slept for fifteen hours. And while I was out, word of my night-time exhibition made the rounds at Abel. No one exactly said anything to me but I couldn’t help noticing the sideways glances people shot me as I walked towards the mess hall this morning or the unprecedented amounts of careful smiles or acknowledging nods that came my way when people did catch my eye.

And when Aaron, who was handing out breakfast rations, handed me the usual bowl of porridge, there were fresh blackberries on it. I looked at him in surprise but he just winked and I understood then that I had been properly accepted into the fold.

Not that the people of Abel have ever been unwelcoming. But I can’t blame them for a certain caution, just short of open mistrust, against a girl who came sailing out of the sky to take the place of one of their most revered and most recently zombified runners.

But this morning, as I was ravenously shoveling porridge into my mouth, I could tell that perhaps for the first time, I was considered to have lived up to the expectation that was attached to the designation of Runner Five. It felt good then and it feels good now but I know I need to be careful. I am still walking on very thin ice and the cautious friendships I am beginning to strike will easily be lost if I say or do the wrong thing.

Especially, I suspect, where Sam Yao is concerned. Sure, it was him who christened me Runner Five in the first place. He has guided me on pretty much every single one of my runs, he stuck by me even when he had no reason to believe that I was still alive. But I cannot help wondering if he is aware of all his motives all the time and what’s going to happen once he realizes that I am not, and will never be, Alice Dempsey. I can only hope that on the day one of us inevitably lets the other down, our friendship will be strong enough to weather the ensuing storm.

I am getting ahead of myself, I guess. And anyway, none of these concerns stop me from appreciating what he did during those long hours that I was lost out there in the dark. Which was why I went looking for him the moment I finished breakfast.

As usual, I found him inside the comms shack which is neither the most inviting nor the most comfortable place to hang out. It’s basically just a hut of corrugated iron that seems ill-fitted even to the purpose of being turned into a latrine (Sam’s word, not mine). Its one redeeming feature is its proximity to Abel’s main power generator which enabled the township’s tech whizzes to wire it up and build their somewhat patchy communications infrastructure.

Still, I don’t see how Sam manages to spend hours on end in there, especially when it’s warm, without feeling the urge to hurt himself.

Upon reaching it, I knocked on what passed as the place’s door – another sheet of corrugated iron with a padlock on it. Seriously, it’s a good thing that the place is pretty much occupied 24/7 and sits in the middle of a busy township surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Otherwise, I don’t see what would stop a burglar who is serious about their business from getting in there and making off with the equipment. Or just break the place.

No, I don’t suppose anyone here would do that. We all rely on each other for survival. But then, I myself live proof that there is much more going on behind the scenes than you or I or even Abel’s leaders realize, so cut me some slack for worrying about our safety and security. I am British. We used to be one of the most surveiled nations in the world. For your own safety and security is part of our cultural DNA. Which, in fact, makes Abel a counter-intuitive place in a lot of ways.

“Come in!” shouted Sam in answer to my knock. I pulled the door open, struggling a little when it got stuck against a lump of dried mud outside. I kicked at it until the door was clear and I was able to pull it fully open. Sam looked at me over his shoulder, blinking in the grey daylight that flooded in past me.

“Five!” he said, his face lighting up. “Come in!” He jumped to his feet, momentarily getting caught in the wire of his headset as he hastened to remove a stack of papers from a rickety chair next to his own. “Have a seat.”

I walked over and sat down, leaving the door open behind me to let the light and some air in. Sam sat back down at what, with some stretch of the imagination, could be called his console. It consisted of a rather messy folding table with a radio and several laptops of various builds and ages on it, all of which were wired to one tall, rather intimidating tower and two keyboards. It all looked completely unintelligible to me. I am about as technophobe as they come, I am sorry to tell you. You will be getting no black or white hat hacking action from me, ever.

“Sorry,” said Sam, looking slightly embarrassed. “Place is a bit of a mess. Janine keeps telling me to clean it up.”

Looking around, I couldn’t blame her as “a bit of a mess” was decidedly an understatement. At the wall opposite me, an ancient server sat on a wooden shelf that had probably once come from Ikea. It was attached to a mess of differently colored wires and humming away loudly. So were several fans that had been placed awkwardly around it and pointed at it. Everywhere else was covered in papers, maps, spare pieces of metal and wiring and other flammables. A health and safety hazard if ever I saw one. Sam’s console looked no better. It was covered in scribbled notes that seemed to have been deliberately arranged around a large, brown stain just next to Sam’s left arm.

“Marmite,” explained Sam, seeing the look on my face. “I tried to scrape it off as best I could but there is not much of the stuff left these days so I figured I might as well keep…” he gestured vaguely at the brown stain, “that.”

I was on the verge of asking whatever for but decided against it. Marmite has always divided the nation into two camps, lovers and haters. There used to be a shop dedicated to the stuff on Regent Street in London which gave customers stickers that allowed them to pledge allegiance to either camp. Personally, I loved the stuff but perhaps not so much as to treasure a stain of it on my desk. Sam chuckled. “Pathetic, I know.”

I didn’t reply. My eyes had moved on from the Marmite and I was now observing one of the screens in front of Sam which had what looked like a rudimentary version of Google Maps on it. An assortment of red and green dots were moving around on it, the red ones by far outnumbering the green ones which were moving away from them. The green ones were labelled with the numbers Three, Eight and Twenty-Three.

“Runners out in the field,” Sam explained pointing at the green dots. He moved his hand to point at the red. “Well clear of this swarm of Zombs at the moment.” He adjusted something on his headset. “Runners Three, Eight, Twenty-Three,” he said. “You’re doing well. There is a small swarm out west but they are well behind you. Just keep running for another ten minutes and you should be seeing the village ahead of you.”

He turned back to me. “Supply run,” he explained. “We’ve had word that there might be some medical supplies at the infirmary of a public school in the village of…” he shuffled some papers on his desk, evidently looking for the name but gave up pretty quickly. “Never mind.”

He turned his head and looked at me. I tore my eyes away from the screen to look back at him but I found the movement of the red and green dots distracting. It felt weird being in here rather than out there with them so I kept glancing back. “Feel pretty weird looking at it from this perspective?” asked Sam and this time I did look fully at him. He laughed at the astonished look on my face.

“Yes,” he said. “I can read minds.” I pulled up my eyebrows and he grinned. “You wouldn’t believe the number of times runners have come in here to tell me how strange it feels to them, being in here rather than out there.” He sighed, looking around. “I don’t blame you. The place is a bit pathetic, isn’t it?” He shrugged. “You get used to it.”

For a moment, we were both silent. Not that I had said anything yet, even though I had come here with the purpose of delivering a lot of thank yous. Now I wasn’t quite sure how to adequately express my gratitude to this man who spends most of his waking hours in a shed, making sure the green dots on his computer screen stay clear of the red ones and come home safely.

This, after all, was the guy who had stayed up all night on a sliver of hope that I might be alive when all odds had been stacked against me. Even by the strange mixture of light from outside, the screens and a small desk lamp, it was impossible not to notice the toll it had taken on him. He looked extremely tired.

“Sam…,” I began but was cut off by a shout from outside. “Runner Five!” Dr Meyers had appeared at the door and she didn’t look best pleased. “There you are!” Sam swiveled around in his chair and she shot him a quick smile. Sam waved at her, “Hi Doc!”, then turned back to his screens.

I got to my feet. “Been looking all over for you,” said Dr Meyers. “I’m sorry but Janine wants to see you immediately.” Sam turned around again. “Give Runner Five a break!” he protested. “She’s been through a lot recently.” I smiled at him but shook my head.

“That’s okay,” I said, walking over to where Dr Meyers was waiting by the door. “She did say to come and see her as soon as I woke up.” I looked at Dr Meyers. “Sorry.” Dr Meyers rolled her eyes at me. “No need to apologize,” she said. “I did try to tell Janine that we should really allow you a little more time but you know what she is like.”

“The first couple of hours after a mission are crucial to a successful debrief,” she and Sam recited in unison. We all shared a chuckle at Janine’s expense, bless her.

“I’m afraid I’m here to fetch you to check that you are fit for duty,” said Dr Meyers apologetically. “They’re sending Five out again?” asked Sam, sounding scandalized. “But she’s only just…”

“I’m okay,” I said quickly but Sam looked doubtful. “Honestly.”

“And I won’t let her go out there without a thorough examination,” said Dr Meyers. I pulled a face at Sam who threw up his hands in defeat. “I don’t even want to know,” he joked. “Just make sure you shut that door behind you. I am starting to feel light-headed with all that fresh air.”

Dr Meyers and I exchanged glances but did as we were told. It was only as I was shutting the door that I remembered something. “Dr Meyers,” I said. “Just a second.” Pulling the door open again, I went back inside.

Sam looked surprised but said nothing until I placed something on the desk in front of him. “Almost forgot I brought you this,” I said, almost regretting coming back for this. It seemed like a silly, inconsequential offering considering everything he had done for me and everything I had failed to say. “It’s not an ice-cream roll, obviously, but…”

“Woah, I love Curly Wurlies!” said Sam before I was able to finish the sentence, his face breaking into a genuine ear-to-ear grin as he looked up at me. “Thanks, Five! I don’t know what to say.” Neither did I and, to be honest, for a moment there, I wondered if he was being sarcastic. I chose to think that he wasn’t.

“No, thank you,” I said quietly, reaching out on an impulse to squeeze his shoulder. “For not leaving me alone out there.” It wasn’t the eloquent speech I had prepared in my head over porridge but for now, it would have to do. With another grateful smile and a nod, I gestured at the three chocolate bars I had placed on the desk. “Enjoy,” I said and hurried back outside where Dr Meyers was waiting.

***

Ben and I found ourselves bathed in bright light. We both froze, raising our arms to shield our eyes against the sudden brightness. There was the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being cocked and a voice said: “Stop right there.”

I blinked and tried to see the speaker past what turned out to be the headlights of an old and rather beaten-looking pick-up. It was a woman with what looked like wild, long curls but that was about as much as I could make out.

“Put that gun down, boy,” she said to Ben. “Nice and easy.” Ben did as he was told. I dropped the cricket bat, even though the woman hadn’t told me to and we both straightened up, arms raised above our heads.

“One false move and I’ll shoot you and leave you to them,” said the woman, jerking her head at the fence behind us from which the gurgling snarls of the… all right, the Zombs… were now clearly audible. I didn’t dare turn to look. I didn’t dare so much as blink. “I might do that anyway.” The woman grabbed her shotgun a little more firmly. “Unless you come up with a very good explanation for what you were doing inside my house.”

“This is… you live here?” The words spilled out of me before I could stop myself. And then I immediately shut up again, realizing that this woman had a shotgun and that the dead bodies we had found in the kitchen a week ago must have been her family. I think the mother must have done it, Ben had said. I swallowed.

“Lived,” corrected the woman. “I left when…” She stopped herself, as if even these few words had been too much and she regretted them. “This is my house,” she said. “So what are you two doing here?”

“I am so sorry,” said Ben slowly, taking a tentative step forward. The shot rang out and Ben danced backwards into me. Grass and soil spattered our feet. I screamed and covered my ears with my hands. The woman aimed the shotgun directly at Ben’s head. The open car door was in between her and us. “Stay right where you are,” the woman commanded. “There is more where that came from.”

By now my eyes had got used to the light enough for me to be able to see her face. She was glaring at us down the barrel of that gun.

“So,” said the woman. “Explain.”

“We found the place about a week ago,” Ben replied, standing completely still. I marveled at how calm his voice sounded, looking at the tense muscles in his neck and shoulders.

“You have been here a week?” The woman sounded incredulous. Ben nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “We didn’t mean to intrude…”

The woman barked a laugh. “Didn’t you?” she asked. “Tell me, didn’t the dead… bodies of my family put you off at all?” The question was so blunt, it completely dumbfounded me and I could tell that it caught Ben off-guard too. He recovered quickly though. “We meant no disrespect,” he said, “but we had nowhere else to go.”

“Oh really?” Finally, her composure dissolved. She closed her eyes briefly, a look of disgust mingled with grief distorting her weary features. “What did you…?” she swallowed. “What did you do with them?”

“We buried them.”

“Where?” she asked. Ben merely moved one arm, very slowly, and pointed in the direction of the field where I knew there were three fresh graves. I was becoming more aware of the gurgling noises behind me. How long, I wondered, before they figured out how to get past that fence. Back then I didn’t know that Zombies don’t exactly figure anything out anymore. They are certainly not very good with obstacles.

“I’m sorry,” Ben repeated, with that quiet tone to his voice that hardly ever fails to disarm people. “We didn’t think anyone was coming back.” It didn’t seem to do much for that woman. She snorted derisively. “So you decided that burying the dead and taking up residence in their house was the way forward?”

It sounded awful the way she said it and under normal circumstances it would have been. It was morbid, too, and sickening but the world by which we had measured these things before had been shaken to its foundations. We weren’t even sure it existed anymore.

“We had nowhere else to go,” Ben said again, voice still calm. “We were in an accident. My friend was very sick.”

Admitting to this turned out to be a bad idea. The gun, which had lowered ever so slightly came up again. More than that, it moved in my direction. Ben almost imperceptibly shifted his stance, shielding me. “Not sick like them,” he said, meaning the people behind us. The woman laughed mirthlessly. “You expect me to take your word for that, do you?”

I would like to tell you that this was when I found my voice. But that would suggest some planned action on my part. And that’s not at all what what I did next felt like. It was as if I was hearing myself speak. Or, and I know this sounds bizarre and probably unnecessarily metaphysical, hearing someone else speak through me.

“No,” that other person said in a voice that didn’t sound like my voice at all. My body, too, acted quite of its own accord, moving past Ben, who reached out to grab my arm, to stand in front of him.

“Stop!” commanded the woman but she did not shoot.

“I’ll prove it to you,” I said, dimly aware that I was now fully exposed to the glaring lights, as if on a stage. My heart was hammering and my head was swimming, my whole body was rigid but something was forcing me to move. “I am going to remove my clothes,” I said, sounding absurd to my own ears. Behind me, Ben drew a sharp breath.

“Em,” he whispered.

“There are no bite marks on me,” I said loudly to the woman. “No unhealed wounds.” We had gathered that much at least before TV and radio had gone dead: this sickness, whatever it was, was passed on through bites, through contact with infected blood and bodily fluids. One sure way of telling if someone was infected were unhealed, festering wounds on their bodies. Like the one Steve had had on his arm. Tasting bile, I pushed the thought aside and swallowed. I stared at the woman. “I didn’t get bitten. I’ll show you.”

The woman considered this, but not for long. “Do it,” she said.

I know how grotesque this sounds. There I was, in the middle of a dark field, caught in the glare of a car’s headlights like a startled deer, with a shotgun pointed at me, a paddock full of Zombies behind me. And slowly, cautiously, forcing myself not to make any abrupt movements, I stripped down to my underwear. Considering that I was wearing several layers – of that woman’s clothes no less – it took me a couple of minutes.

What can I say? This is a crazy world now and people do crazy things. What’s more, back then everything was new and seemed even more out of synch than it does now.

I could tell you that I wasn’t thinking straight and perhaps I wasn’t. Perhaps there was a different way of proving to this woman there and then that I hadn’t been infected with this new plague that had taken her family, of stopping her from shooting Ben and me through the heads but I couldn’t see it. At least not while we also had to worry about the Zombs behind us. And I could tell that Ben was worried. Considering how little I had contributed to our survival so far and that it now all seemed to come down to the question of whether I was going to start biting people or not, to prove that I wasn’t, to place my life entirely in that strange woman’s hands – or show her that I knew it was in her hands anyway – I would have done stranger things.

I am not saying it seemed like the sensible thing to do at the time. I just did it. Shivering in the biting cold that seemed all the more violent now that I had removed layer upon layer of clothes, I stood between the woman and Ben and the snarling, gurgling horde in the paddock behind us in nothing but my bra and knickers, my arms raised above my head. I wasn’t even embarrassed. I was cold and desperate. Behind me, Ben seemed to be holding his breath.

“Turn around,” commanded the woman and I did as I was told. Slowly, making sure that she could see every inch of my unbroken skin in the headlights. I didn’t look at Ben as I turned to face him. Instead, I took the opportunity of looking at the people in the paddock. The fence was holding them in check all right but they had shambled right up to it and were pushing against it. Whether it would withstand the combined weight of all those bodies, I wasn’t sure. More worryingly still, some of them were outside the paddock at the far right, shuffling slowly to its corner. They would reach us soon. I made myself turn slowly back to face the woman.

“See?” I heard myself say. I was beginning to shiver violently. “None of them got me. Please don’t shoot us.”

“What about him?” asked the woman, nodding towards Ben.

“I’ll happily take my clothes off for you,” Ben said without any of the innuendo that this kind of statement usually comes with. Coming from Ben, it sounded even more out of place than my ridiculous striptease had been. “But perhaps we could agree to put some distance between us and…,” he paused, “…them first.”

My teeth were rattling by now but I didn’t dare lower my arms or pick up my clothes. Personally, I wanted to beg this woman, on my hands and knees if I had to, to take us with her. Even though she had a gun pointed at my head. Yeah, so I was a bit spineless back then.

For a moment, no one said anything. Then the woman lowered the gun at last. “Fine,” she snapped. “Get in the car. Leave the gun.” I turned to look at Ben who nodded grimly, kicking his gun out of reach with his foot.

Quickly, we gathered my stuff and dashed over to where the woman was still next to the truck, watchful eyes darting back and forth between the paddock and us.

Ben opened the door on the passenger side and I froze momentarily when I saw that the woman was now pointing a smaller handgun at us through her open door. The shotgun was leaning on the door next to her.

“Put some clothes on,” she said to me, then tossed something at Ben and when he caught it, I saw that it was handcuffs. “Get her inside then cuff her to the door,” she said to Ben who was looking at the woman almost admiringly, then nodded at me. Quickly, I put my clothes back on, then scrambled inside.

After the cold outside, the warmth inside the truck burned my cheeks. Gently, Ben took my left hand and fixed one of the handcuffs around my wrist, the other around the handle on the door. Then he looked straight into my eyes. “That was… unusual,” he said quietly, almost smiling. “Good thinking.”

“Shut up,” said the woman harshly, the gun still pointed at my head. “Step away from her.” Never taking his eyes off my face, Ben took two steps backwards, out of reach. Suddenly, I felt scared. Was she going to leave Ben behind? The woman climbed inside the truck and sat down on the free seat next to me, the one between me and the driver’s seat.

“Walk around the car,” she told Ben. “And get in. You will be driving. Hands on the wheel where I can see them. Any funny business and I’ll shoot her.” Ben nodded grimly. Then he moved around the truck and got in. The Zombies outside the paddock were now much closer but they stayed clear of the headlights.

“Police?” Ben asked the woman as he gripped the steering wheel with both hands.

The woman didn’t answer his question. “Just drive,” she said, pressing the gun into my ribs.

#zombiesrun #samyao #runnerfive #fanfiction #zombies #myrunnerfive

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