Starting again. Sooner or later they would have to consider it. She was of prime childbearing age herself. So was Colette and Rachel and a number of other women in the group.
“He’d take them anyway,” Colette said. “It’s what he’s like. Always looking after people.”
Beth smiled. “You would say that you’re his daughter.”
“True,” Colette said. “But it’s also the end of the world, in case you hadn’t noticed. If he was an asshole, I’d have no reason to stick around.”
Beth nodded, but she thought plenty of women had stuck around for far less than protection, food, and shelter.
“Think about it,” Colette said. “It would be good to have you with us.”
Beth smiled. On the surface, this was an ideal setup, and she could be forgiven for thinking that being found by the convoy in the first place was the luckiest thing that has ever happened to her. However, if she was going to make the decision on behalf of everyone who had followed her from Harmony, then she had a duty to look deeper.
“I’ll see you around?” Colette said and gave another of her generous smiles.
Beth smiled back. “Sure,” she said and watched her walk away.
* * * * *
She needed to go somewhere that she could be alone and think. Dawn was talking to the old woman, Kathy, and Noel was close by. Satisfied that her sister wasn’t going to get into any trouble, Beth took herself back up the hill towards the camp.
There was a spot, a few metres into the forest that surrounded the campsite. It was dark and lonely and exactly what she wanted.
She found a fallen tree that was big enough for her to use as a seat. It wasn’t comfortable, but she had a feeling that might turn out to be a good thing. If she fell asleep in the dark, then she wouldn’t be any closer to reaching a decision when she woke.
It came down to a simple question but not one she could easily answer: could Russell be trusted?
The thing was, she couldn’t prove it either way. There was no test that he could perform, no question that she could ask him. So sitting by herself in the dark forest wasn’t going to help her prove it one way or the other.
Did she trust him then?
She liked him, but that didn’t make him trustworthy. She was grateful to him for rescuing her and the others from the zombies. She believed his story about fleeing from London and heading north, but there might have been more that he hadn’t told her.
What exactly was she scared of? What did she think he was going to do?
Beth leaned back on the tree trunk and sighed into the darkness. Since the zombies had arrived, the world had become quieter. The sounds she heard in the distance were all easily identifiable as belonging to the convoy. There was no traffic or machinery. She hadn’t even been aware of the electric hum in the air until it was no longer there.
The world had changed, and she couldn’t deny it. Maybe once upon a time, it would have been crazy to go off in a van with a long haired old man and his ‘friends’. But it didn’t seem so crazy now.
Beth stood up.
Russell had told her to take her time and consider his offer, but she’d taken as much as she needed. If she kept thinking, then she would change her mind again and again, and she needed to be brave.
She marched down the hill towards the convoy, where the party was beginning to break up. Russell was standing by the jeep at the front talking to a blond woman that Beth didn’t know. He was drinking out of a metal tanker and blowing smoke into the air.
“Beth!” he cried as she walked towards him.
Her arms swung back and forth, and she was aware of the grim look on her face.
“It’s good to see you,” he said. “What did you think of the food?”
“Yes,” she said, blurting out the words as if they had been trapped in her throat.
“Excuse me?” Russell said.
“We’ll come with you,” she said.
He started to smile and then stepped towards her. “I’m pleased to hear it,” he said. “The more, the merrier.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” the woman said. “It looks like you’ve got plenty to discuss.”
Before she could step away, Russell took the woman’s arm and pulled her towards him. She leaned towards him and they kissed on the mouth. Beth wondered whether the woman was Russell’s wife or if she had just made a very big mistake.
CHAPTER NINE
Velma sat by herself in the canteen and listened to them talk about her as if she wasn’t there.
“Now he’s dead, and it’s her fault.”
“She let him get away, and now we’re all going to die.”
“I can’t believe she had the cheek to come back here.”
And so on.
She looked down at her bowl of soup and didn’t feel like eating any of it. Harold had promised that the talking would stop eventually, but that didn’t seem to be happening. She tried to brush it off, to tell herself that they needed someone to blame, and it might as well be her, but it didn’t help.
It was the same everywhere she went. They spoke about her in the corridors and in the library. People no longer pretended they weren’t staring at her when she walked past. When she had gone to the bathroom for a shower the previous morning, she had found graffiti on the bathroom wall:
‘Velma Beck fucks zombies.’
Each letter was a foot high, and she could see it the whole time she was washing. When she told Harold about it he’d laughed, but at least it had been gone by the time she went in there again.
She picked up her tray and carried it to the counter. It was a crime to waste food, but she couldn’t stomach it and knew that if she tried she would be bending over a toilet throwing up in the next twenty minutes. She put the tray down and walked away.
* * * * *
There wasn’t much to do in the compound except work and, so far, she hadn’t been given anything to do. She thought that was probably because no one was willing to work with her, and she would have been right. Every eight hours she saw people going off to work and others coming back tired and hungry. She envied them having something to do but had grown to hate the idea of being around other people for any length of time.
She walked slowly along the wide corridors, gradually making her way back to her room. She had a book that she was reading but no other plans. The greatest excitement she’d had recently had been when the Klaxon had gone off the previous week. And that had turned out to be a false alarm triggered by a rat.
Ahead of her, there were a group of men and women in military fatigues huddled together. At first, Velma thought they were talking about her, experience had taught her to believe it, but as she approached none of them seemed to notice her.
She didn’t try to overhear what they were saying. She had little interest in gossip. She took an extra wide berth to avoid being noticed, but only because she hoped to get back to her room without being shouted at, called names or be spat on.
None of them looked around, and she reached the door without being noticed. She kept walking until she heard one of them say “Level-C” and then she stopped.
Velma didn’t know much about Level-C, but she knew that it was in the medical block. She had heard people talking about it and, even, treated people who had worked down there. She knew enough to know that it was top secret and not the sort of thing that people should be openly discussing in the corridor.
She pretended to be looking at the noticeboard on the wall. The soldiers were just behind her, but she still couldn’t hear everything they were saying.
Velma moved closer until she could hear more clearly.
“It escaped?”
“They wouldn’t listen to him. He told them he wanted to burn the place down.”
“He tried to do it himself.”
“Where is he now?”
“In the brink.”
“They going to let him out?”
“If they do it’s going to be on the other side of the
wall. He tried to burn the place down. Burn it down!”
“But if it already escaped…”
“So what are we going to do?”
The question hung in the air, and Velma found that she was holding her breath. She wondered whether they were talking about a prison break.
“We can’t talk here.”
She froze. Although it seemed inevitable that they would realise she was close enough to hear them talking, she hadn’t actually considered the consequences.
“Let’s go back to mine.”
“Is it secure?”
“We can make it secure.”
She heard their boots on the floor as they started to walk away. After a moment, she turned around and watched them go, but there was nothing identifiable about their backs.
It wouldn’t be much to go on, and maybe he would think she was just wasting his time, but she knew she should tell Harold what she had heard. He would want to know.
Velma watched the soldiers until they disappeared around a corner and her opportunity to follow them had passed. She could let it go. Just because they had been talking about it, didn’t mean they were actually planning to do anything.
If they weren’t then, it didn’t matter. She couldn’t name any of them so the only thing Harold would be able to do was put more security around the prison. If their talk came to nothing, then they would never even know.
Velma started to walk, not yet sure whether she was going to see Harold or not. The thought of talking to someone was appealing, however, and it was that, more than anything else, that made up her mind to go.
* * * * *
It was after seven o’clock, but she knew that she would find Harold in his office. He kept odd hours and, except for the first time, she hadn’t failed to find him there when she’d gone looking. The other offices were all empty, and the administrators had all gone. The only light was coming from the top of his door.
Velma stopped outside and knocked.
There was a brief pause and then he answered. “It’s open.”
She turned the handle and went in. His office was icy cold, and she felt the hairs on her arms stand up.
He looked at her from his desk and, for a moment, she thought he was going to tell her to get out. Harold looked tired. The hair on the sides of his head had started to grow out, and he looked older than she was used to seeing him.
“Hi,” she said.
Harold pinched the skin between his eyes. “What do you want?” he said.
“Can I sit down?” she said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“Is it important? I’m in the middle of something here.”
“It won’t take long,” she said.
He continued to look at her, and she waited to see whether he would tell her to come back later.
“Take a seat,” he said and indicated the chairs in front of his desk.
Velma closed the door and sat down.
“Well, what is it?” Harold said.
Perhaps she should have come back another time. What she had to tell him now seemed small and inconsequential. The prison was already well guarded, it was unlikely that a bunch of squaddies would be able to break in, let alone out. She felt as if she was wasting his time.
“What is it, Velma? I don’t have all day.”
She started to stand. The last thing she wanted to do was upset Harold. He was the closest thing she had to a friend in the compound, a fact that made her feel very lonely.
“Sit down.”
She sat.
“What did you come here to tell me?”
She found that she couldn’t look at him while she spoke, so she looked at the edge of his desk instead. “I heard people talking.”
“About you? Velma, I told you, they’ll get over it soon enough.”
She shook her head.
“What then?”
She took a deep breath and then told him. If she had been looking at him then she would have seen his eyes widen when she mentioned ‘Level-C’ but she didn’t. When she had finished, she raised her head, expecting to see him looking angry, but instead he was almost smiling.
“What?” she said.
“Velma, what do you know about Level-C?”
She shook her head. “Nothing really. I heard they did some tests there, but I don’t know what.”
“You’re not lying to me, are you?”
She shook her head again. She hadn’t expected him to focus on the basement level, hadn’t he heard her say that there were people planning a prison break?
“What’s Level-C?” she said.
“It’s beyond your security clearance,” Harold said.
“They said something escaped,” she said.
He nodded but didn’t elaborate.
“It was the other day, wasn’t it? When the Klaxons went off.”
Harold nodded again.
“Are you going to make me guess the whole thing?” she said.
He sighed and stared at her across the table.
“Harold, we used to be friends, didn’t we?”
He didn’t answer, and she decided to save them both the embarrassment of labouring the point. If they hadn’t been friends, they had at least been colleagues.
“You know you can trust me,” she said.
“We’ve worked on secret projects before,” he said.
“Exactly. Maybe I can help?”
It seemed unlikely that she would be able to do anything beyond listening to his concerns, but she was talking to someone who didn’t look like they were about to spit in her face and she didn’t want to be sent back to her room like a naughty child.
When she asked him “what happened?” she didn’t really care what it had been, it was the flow of the conversation that kept her glued to her seat.
Harold paused for a moment before answering. “There was an ‘incident’ on Level-C,” he said.
“What sort of incident?” she said.
“You would have to know what we keep on Level-C to appreciate it,” he said.
“So tell me.”
He pinched his eyes together again. “The samples that we took from zombies weren’t only being used to find a cure. We always knew that might not be possible and, even if it was, the country would still be overrun with zombies. We needed a way to fight them.”
Velma nodded and wondered how many more ways they needed to fight zombies. They had guns and bombs. In her mind, once they had found the cure, the army would be sent to destroy the remaining zombies and make the country safe again.
Harold shook his head. “It seems foolish now.”
“Tell me,” Velma said.
“We thought we could create hybrids. Something that we could control. You saw what happened to the zombies that fed on Dale?”
She nodded.
“The cure was inside him the whole time.”
“What escaped?” she said.
“The project designation was Alpha-213,” Harold said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a hybrid zombie using samples of Dale’s DNA and some of the stronger creatures we discovered. It doesn’t decay like the others, and it is much stronger. They thought… we thought that it could be used to kill zombies and make the country safe.”
“And now it’s gone?” she said.
Harold nodded and then he looked at her. His expression almost made it look as if he was seeking forgiveness. Perhaps that was exactly what he was doing.
“There were others weren’t there?” Velma said.
Harold nodded. “Failed experiments mostly, mutants that didn’t quite work.”
“Why wasn’t it destroyed?” Velma said.
“They are the last remaining sources of Dale’s blood. If we destroyed them, then there would be nothing left, no way to manufacture a cure.”
Velma leaned back in her chair and considered what he had told her. Regardless of what his intentions had been the fact remained; they had created a super zombie, and now
it had escaped. She couldn’t imagine how things could be much worse.
“Let me go after it,” she said.
“You?” he said. “Velma, this is a job for soldiers, trained men, and women who know what they’re doing. You’re a doctor.”
“If you send soldiers they’ll kill it,” she said.
Harold nodded grimly. “Very likely. Are you suggesting that you could bring it back alive?”
Was she? That seemed like a big promise to make and one that she wasn’t sure she could keep. “I’m not saying send me alone,” she said. “Give me some soldiers to work with and put me in charge. I’ll bring it back.”
“Alive?”
“If I can. Then you can continue your experiments.”
Harold didn’t say anything for a long time. Velma sat opposite him and wondered what had possessed her to make such a promise. Although it was true that she had grown tired of being in the compound that didn’t mean she wanted to leave. She had spent weeks trying to get back and had no great desire to spend more time in the wilderness.
It was a way to prove herself, she thought. If she could lead a team of soldiers and recapture the super zombie, then she could also win back the respect of the people she had to live with. They would stop talking about how she had let Dale kill himself, and start talking about how she had recaptured the super zombie, and saved them all.
She watched Harold. He seemed to be having trouble making up his mind.
“Think about it like this,” she said. “The worst case scenario is that I leave and get myself killed, and then I’m out of your hair forever. The best case scenario is that I bring back the super zombie, and you can carry on your experiments. You don’t have anything to lose.”
“Okay,” he said. “Have it your way. I’ll speak to the General and get a team together. How soon can you be ready to leave?”
“The morning?” she said.
He nodded. “You’d better get some rest then. I’ll tell the General to have his men ready for an 0900 departure.”
Zero Hour (Zombie Apocalypse Book 2) Page 11