by Nathan Allen
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 towards doing that.
He crossed the street and fished around in his pocket for his car k
eys.
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.
They 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
Miles stumbled into the kitchen early the next morning and fixed himself some coffee. He had woken up with a dry mouth and an aching head after only managing about three hours sleep. It wasn’t the best preparation for the day ahead.
In the past couple of weeks, his old nemesis insomnia had come back to torment him. Insomnia was sometimes a temporary thing, but lately it had become more like Fabian: an unwelcome and annoying visitor that had long overstayed its welcome.
Once again, the house was a mess. The stench was overwhelming, a mixture of cigarettes, stale beer, patchouli incense and God only knows what else. Miles was convinced this incessant hippie odour was affecting the property value. It was probably more detrimental to the resale value of the house than the four zombies that had been killed there.
He gulped down his coffee and immediately made another one. He wondered if he would be better off mainlining the caffeine, cooking up some powder in a spoon and injecting it directly into his veins.
He retrieved his neighbour’s newspaper from his front yard – it was still being delivered, despite the fact that the neighbour was now undead and languishing in a holding facility somewhere – then retreated to his bedroom.
Clea was awake too, which was unusual for this hour. He could hear her moving around, traipsing between her bedroom and the bathroom and back again. He wasn’t really in the mood to speak to her, but he wasn’t about to go out of his way to avoid her either. What was said last night may cause some awkwardness between them, but so be it. It was better than bottling it all up. Everything was out in the op
en now. If she wanted to apologise he might consider doing it too. But only if she went first. Clea had a lot more to apologise for than he did.
He flicked through The Daily Ink, finding only the usual end-of-days proclamations and news stories that resembled press releases from Bernard Marlowe’s office.
Page three was filled with photos of Stephanie and Madison Marlowe partying with a touring rock band, conveniently stepping out onto the hotel balcony where they were in full view of the paparazzi.
Miles stopped briefly to look at a double page feature on Lawrence Devereaux, the politician who was Marlowe’s right-hand man and number one attack dog. He glanced at it for a few seconds, before realising it was just another fawning puff piece that read more like an online dating profile than a piece of journalism.
He tossed the paper aside, and then froze.
He didn’t know what made him think of it, but something he remembered hearing yesterday suddenly drilled back into his mind.
He retrieved the newspaper and returned to the last page he looked at. His eyes scanned through the article, searching for information that may confirm his suspicions.
And then, in amongst all the pompous guff about how Lawrence Devereaux’s “strong Christian faith imbued him with the values of loving kindness, justice and righteousness”, he found just what he was looking for:
Mr. Devereaux has been married to Geraldine for thirty-one years. They have three children: Emily, Sebastian and Thomas.
Miles was dumbstruck. He read those two sentences over and over again to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. But there it was, in black and white.
Lawrence Devereaux had a son called Sebastian.
Amoeba’s real name was Sebastian Devereaux.
Holy freakin’ crap.
Lawrence Devereaux was Amoeba’s father.
This revelation took some time to sink in completely. The six foot six cross-dressing professional agitator and performance artist known as “Amoeba” was also the son of a high-profile and highly divisive anti-zombie politician.