Zom-B Family

by Darren Shan

  My training kicks in and I instinctively look for angles. Revitalizeds usually have the advantage over reviveds in a one-on-one battle, since we have the full use of our mental faculties. But twelve against one is a completely different scenario. It would be a huge challenge at the best of times. Given my sorry state, I have a mountain to climb. But success isn’t an impossibility. Master Zhang taught us to look for the positive in any fight and to always believe that victory is ours for the taking.

  The zombies aren’t paying any attention to me. They see me as one of their own, and the undead don’t attack their kin. I can use that to shake them up and lure them away from Vinyl.

  My focus settles on the children. I target the smallest girl, shift across until I’m directly in her path, and brace myself. The pack draws abreast of me. The girl tries to veer round. I tackle her, pick her up, grab a leg and arm, then swing her like a scythe, knocking over the nearest zombies, before lobbing her at the others, like throwing a bowling ball at a set of pins.

  The reviveds go down in a confused huddle, moaning and roaring with surprise. One of the boys is next to me. He’s young, and until a minute ago he was innocent, but I don’t think about that. Making a blade of my right hand, I drive my fingers at the side of his head, to break through the covering of bone and destroy the brain within.

  “Bloody hell!” I scream as my fingers smash against what feels like a brick wall. As I shake my hand and wince, I remember that Dan-Dan sheared off the bones that I’ve grown to rely on. They’ve been deadly weapons in my battles to date. Now they’re gone.

  “Oh dear,” Dan-Dan hollers. “Did you forget that you don’t have your lovely finger bones any longer? What now, little girl?”

  Ignoring Dan-Dan’s heckling, I pick up the boy and throw him at the adult zombies who are getting back to their feet. As they go down in a heap again, I lean over one of the women, open my mouth wide and bite down behind her left ear. Dan-Dan had a swell time chipping away at my teeth and drilling through to the buried nerve endings, but he only removed a few, and the rest are sharp enough to still be of use.

  I rip a chunk of skull away. As the woman shrieks, I dig into her brain with my fingers and jerk them around until she falls still.

  One down, eleven to go.

  “I should have ground those teeth down to the gums,” Dan-Dan mutters. “I was too soft on the savage creature.”

  “Nonsense,” Justin snorts. “She must have some means of disabling her opponents, otherwise it would be a one-sided fight, and where’s the sport in that?”

  “Go on, Becky,” an animated Vicky Wedge cheers. “Bite, girl, bite!”

  I tune out the members of the Board and attack one of the men. I catch him as he’s getting to his feet and finish him off the same way as the woman.

  The others are upright now and they’re no longer focused on Vinyl. Instead they’re glaring at me. Reviveds can’t understand it when one of us turns against them. Treachery isn’t in their nature. But when offended, they’re quick to respond to the insult.

  All ten of the remaining zombies launch themselves at me. I fall into a ball and roll, knocking a few to the ground, evading the clutches of the others. I need something to strike them with. I can’t expect to chew my way through all of their skulls. They won’t hold still for me like the first pair.

  Master Zhang taught us to look for weapons everywhere. We usually didn’t leave County Hall tooled up. Instead we were told to make the most of everyday items that might be lying around. A brick, a spoon, a CD, a pair of glasses… I could wreak havoc with any of those objects.

  The trouble is, the floor of the cage is littered with dust but nothing else. No feeding bowls, no loose chains, no discarded knives. There aren’t even any good-sized stones.

  One of the men grabs me and jabs at my skull with his fangs. I glimpse a length of rope swinging in front of my eyes and recall how the humans were held in place while they were alive. As I duck my head back and forth, I grab hold of the rope and run my left hand up to where the knot holds the noose in place. I close my fingers into a fist and jam it against the knot. Then, with my right hand, I pull sharply, tightening the noose swiftly and fiercely.

  The rope rips through the man’s neck and his head flies from its perch, to hit the ground and tumble through the dirt. There’s a huge cheer from the watching humans. They liked that move!

  As more of the zombies hurl themselves at me, I use the decapitated man’s body as a shield. I haven’t killed him, but he can’t get his bearings without his head, so his arms and legs flail wildly.

  I’m backing away, desperately searching for something that might pass as a weapon, when one of the man’s hands strikes my cheek. His nails slice into my flesh and open a thin cut. It’s only a minor sting, but I pause as a thought strikes.

  Hiding my head beneath the man’s chest, ignoring the probing fingers of the other zombies, I pull the man’s arm in close, bite into his wrist and sever through flesh and bone. As the hand starts to come loose, I rip it free, then push the man back into the huddle of his companions and scrabble clear.

  The boy I tried to brain leaps through the air and lands on me, driving me down. He tears at the bandages around my rib cage and starts digging into what’s left of my guts. With a scream of pain and fury, I squeeze the fingers of the severed hand together, hold it like a dagger, then drive the bones sticking out of the fingertips through the center of the boy’s forehead.

  “Now that’s sheer genius!” Dan-Dan whoops as the boy spasms and falls away. “I told you she’d make a decent fight of it, didn’t I?”

  “I stand corrected,” Justin laughs. “What a warrior.”

  In an ideal world, I’d stop to toss a quip their way, something along the lines of, You have to hand it to me! But there’s no time for childish one-upmanship. Eight of the zombies are still active. If I lose my focus for even a second, it will be the end of me.

  One of the women rushes me. Raising a foot, I kick the side of her head and make perfect contact. There’s a cracking sound and she flies sideways. She doesn’t get up again, but squirms like a dying fish. I must have damaged her brain with the blow, not enough to kill her, but to put her out of commission, at least for the immediate future.

  A man rugby-tackles me. I hammer an elbow into the middle of his back. It hurts him but he doesn’t let go. The rest of the zombies crowd around and suddenly I’m being dragged across the yard in a pack. I keep pounding at the man and the others, but they don’t release me.

  Finally we go down in a pack, the zombies losing their balance. It’s chaos, and as they lash out at one another, trying to break free of the mess, I grab a woman’s skull and sink my teeth in. I break through to the brain, but before I can stab into it, she pulls herself free and the chance to finish her off is lost.

  One of the creatures gets a hand inside the hole where my heart used to be and starts scraping at the flesh, opening up wounds which had just begun to heal after Dan-Dan’s meddling. Howling, I beat at the hand until it’s withdrawn.

  Sitting up, I grab the first head that I see–it turns out to be one of the girls–wrap an arm round it and twist until the neck snaps. Pushing the disoriented zombie away, I force myself backwards. I don’t get very far before running up against the bars of the cage. The zombies screech with delight–they think they have me cornered–but this is bad news for them. The bars are cold, hard steel. Impossible to wrench free. But I can use their solidity.

  A tall black man with dyed orange hair lunges at me. I shimmy aside, grab his shoulders and slam him headfirst into a couple of the bars. His skulls shatters and he drops.

  The woman whose skull I bit through attacks next. Grabbing her head, I slam it into the bars, but she doesn’t go down as neatly as the orange-haired man. Grunting, she manages to latch on to my hand and chews into it, drawing another scream from my lips.

  The girl with the snapped neck has staggered away from the ruckus as she tries to set her head back in its ri
ghtful place. The other girl throws herself on top of me and the woman, getting in the way of the adults who could otherwise have taken advantage of my indisposition to finish me off.

  As the girl slaps and tugs at me, the woman continues to grind down. I explore with the fingers of my free hand, find the hole in her head that I had earlier opened up, and try digging in. But the hole’s too small. I can’t damage enough of her brain to stall her.

  One of the men starts to tug the girl away. I only have a few seconds before I’m exposed again. Inserting a lone finger into the hole in the woman’s head, I exert pressure and try to snap off another shard of bone. If her skull holds, that will be the end of me. But luck hasn’t deserted me entirely. A long sliver of bone snaps off in my hand. It almost slips away from me, but I snatch at it before it drops, get a good grip, then drive it into the woman’s brain like a dagger.

  As the woman’s teeth relax and she slips away, I spin swiftly and drive the bit of bone through the eye of the man closing in on me. It pops the eye and embeds itself in his brain. He shrieks and backpedals, knocking the remaining zombies aside before he collapses and dies.

  I shove the girl off and ram her head into the bars. As she drops, I realize to my astonishment that I now have only two zombies to deal with, a woman and a boy. The others are either dead or incapacitated.

  I stare suspiciously at the pair as they get back to their feet and come after me. This can’t be right. I can’t have gotten through the group as quickly as that. I start replaying the battle, trying to put each step in order. Then the boy and woman are digging at my eyes and I have to scrap the analysis or face an embarrassing last-gasp defeat.

  Falling back on my most basic defensive move, I head butt the woman, then the boy. As they reel away from me, I follow like a hound, make a fist and start punching at their heads. Several sharp blows later, I’ve smashed through both skulls and pulped their brains.

  Rising slowly, head spinning, I set my sights on the last three zombies. The girl with the snapped neck is spinning around, tugging at her head, trying to fix it. I slip up behind her, nudge her towards the bars of the cage, then slam her into them to finish her off.

  The woman whose head I kicked is still writhing in the dirt. She’s probably no longer a threat, but I limp across, raise my foot high, then bring my heel down on her skull a few times until she falls still forever.

  That just leaves the headless guy. His body is stumbling around, fingers twitching as he searches for his missing head. I drag my weary carcass over to where his severed head is lying, pick it up, then hurl it with the last of my strength at the bars of the cage, where it shatters like a melon. The humans behind the cage shriek and dart out of the way of the blood and flying scraps of bone and brain. The man’s body slumps.

  I slump as well. I stare numbly at the corpses, then catch Vinyl’s eye and give him a shaky thumbs-up. “Too easy,” I wheeze, then cover my eyes with an arm and make a hoarse, choked, wheezing sound that is something between a triumphant chuckle and a horrified sob.

  FOURTEEN

  The humans are cheering loudly. Some push forward and bang the bars of the cage, letting me know that they considered this first-rate entertainment. Maybe they would have viewed it differently if they’d had to crack open those skulls using their own hands.

  I recall the expressions of the men I killed, the women, the children. And try driving them from my thoughts as soon as the grisly images pop into my head.

  I force myself to my feet and drag myself across to where Vinyl is hanging. He stares at me with disbelief. “If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he murmurs. “You were like a whirlwind of death.”

  “I did what I had to,” I grunt. “They were dead already. I simply put them out of their misery.”

  “I know. But one against twelve… Damn, girl, you’re the hottest thing on two legs since Bruce Lee.”

  I chuckle weakly, even though I don’t really want Vinyl’s compliments. I’d go without compliments for the rest of my life if I could bring back even a single one of the twelve people now lying dead in the cage. I don’t want to be a warrior of great repute. I simply want to be able to stop killing.

  “Thanks, B,” Vinyl says softly. “I know it can’t have been easy.”

  “You have no idea,” I sigh, rolling my neck, fighting the pain, trying to stay focused. I can barely stand. I don’t know how I kept going during the battle. It would be nice to think I could enjoy a well-earned rest at the end of this, but I know Dan-Dan’s torture table is all that awaits.

  I turn creakily and look for the despicable child-killer. He waves at me, then clasps his hands over his head and shakes them as if we’d just won a big match. My dad is close by, smiling proudly. The fool.

  I raise a hand for quiet, and to my surprise everyone shuts up instantly. Maybe they think I’m going to make a victory speech.

  “I won,” I call to Dan-Dan. “Set Vinyl free, like we agreed.”

  Dan-Dan squints at me. “I don’t recall us striking a deal. In fact I don’t think we even discussed one.”

  I start to tremble, but quickly suppress the tremors, not wanting to show any fear. “Don’t mess with me,” I growl. “I fought the way you wanted. I killed as you wished. Let him go.”

  “Yes, Daniel,” Owl Man pipes up. “She dueled in good faith. Do the decent thing and free her friend.”

  Dan-Dan blinks at Owl Man, then cocks his head at Justin and Vicky Wedge. “What do you think?”

  “We don’t do deals with the undead,” Vicky grins.

  “Life isn’t fair,” Justin says. “She failed to set her terms before she fought, so she can have no legal comeback.”

  “Bullshit!” Josh roars, surprising me with his support. “We make the laws here, and I say she’s done enough. Let the boy go. In fact you should let her go too.”

  Some of the people around the cage mutter their approval, but Justin takes the challenge to his authority in his stride.

  “You do not make the laws here, Mr. Massoglia. We do.” He gestures at himself, Vicky Wedge and Dan-Dan. “We are the cement that binds the Klan with the army. If you remove us from the equation, the result will be anarchy. Who wants that?”

  Nobody answers his challenge. Many look shifty and stub the ground with their toes, but nobody speaks up against him. Justin casts his gaze around, snorts with satisfaction, then addresses Dan-Dan again.

  “You can decide what to do with the pair, Lord Wood, as is your right.”

  Dan-Dan scratches his chin and pretends to be caught on the horns of a moral dilemma. “Well, I don’t want to be unfair to the girl,” he muses aloud. “She fought like a lioness defending her cubs, and it would be wrong to ignore that. At the same time, let’s not forget that she’s a zombie. Murder is in her blood. And the boy is her accomplice.”

  “This isn’t looking good,” Vinyl croaks behind me as Dan-Dan sighs and rolls his eyes theatrically.

  “Keep the faith,” I tell him, even though I don’t have any myself. I pin my gaze on Dan-Dan, hoping against hope that he’ll show some small shred of mercy, if only to keep his supporters quiet.

  “Tell you what,” he finally declares, “let’s put a deal in place. The pitiful, undead wretch doesn’t deserve it in my opinion, but I’m a reasonable man, and it will give her something solid to fight for.

  “Three more contests,” he says to me. “If you win all of those, your friend can walk free.”

  I stare at him sickly. “You mean I’ll have to fight three more times?”

  “Yes,” he beams. “And, to keep it interesting, we’ll add another four zombies to the mix each time.”

  “No!” someone roars, and I realize with numb shock that it’s my dad. “You’re out of line. That’s asking way too much of her.”

  “Be careful,” Dan-Dan snaps, “or I’ll stick you in there.”

  “Todd has a point, Daniel,” Owl Man says. “If you make her fight back-to-back, she will surely fail. You
should give her a sporting chance, time to recover between bouts, maybe a weapon if the number of opponents are increased.”

  I look back at him, then at Dan-Dan. If I’m afforded a decent break each time, and a weapon…

  Dan-Dan’s smile kills the bloom of hope before it can fully form.

  “Time?” he hoots. “Nonsense. She’s a zombie. She doesn’t need to rest, and I’m wary of her breaking out if we give her a weapon. We’ll stick in her next sixteen opponents right away and, if she defeats those, the next round will take place after that, and…” He rolls a finger around in the air. “You get the idea.”

  Dad gapes at Dan-Dan, unable to believe his ears. Me, I don’t have ears any longer, so I’ve no problem believing him.

  “B,” Vinyl says as Dan-Dan sends some Klanners off to rustle up another batch of prisoners to be infected and set against me.

  “Yeah?” I mutter, not glancing back, not wanting him to catch my distraught expression.

  “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

  “No,” I lie. “I feel good. I reckon I can–”

  “B,” he says, sternly this time. “If you’re going to lie to me, have the decency to look me in the eye.”

  I turn, wincing as my bones creak and my flesh tears. I stare at Vinyl for a moment, then shake my head softly. “I’ll give it my all, but there’s no way I can beat a group like that again. I’m running on fumes. I got lucky last time, but it took everything out of me. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to apologize for,” he smiles. “You were immense. I’m honored that you fought on my behalf.” A sly smirk crosses his face. “You wanna help me turn the table on these suckers, really stick it to that lunatic in the sailor suit?”

  “You have a plan?” I ask incredulously.

  “You know me,” he smirks. “Always a few steps ahead of everybody else. That’s why they sent me to a school for brainiacs.”