Blue

by Brandy Wehinger

  My best friend is Oscar. He is really funny and smart. He is good at pretty much everything, which is great because he helps me with maths homework. (Actually I just copy his answers!)

  My father is a Council Leader, and my mother doesn’t really do anything except read and tell people what to do. Our house is big and she has to make sure everyone is doing their job — or so she says. My brother, Elliot, is sixteen years old. He is one of my best friends and always brings me gifts when he comes home from school at Desert Camp where he’s studying. He’s going to be a Leader someday like Father. I’ve told you about Jenny. She looks like Mother — tall and thin, with red hair, which she braids on top of her head. She thinks she is really smart and tries to act like an adult, but I know she still secretly plays with dolls in her room.

  Things I dislike: birds (their flapping wings are gross), a girl named Tash at school (she’s so crazy!) and being bored.

  My letter is twice as long as the letter you sent me. I think you can probably do better. Could you please write a longer letter next time? Maybe you could tell me about your tree house.

  I hope you have nice weather.

  Yours sincerely,

  Rose Grosvenor

  KATIE, early years A. Z.

  GOING ABOUT LIFE after the Zombie apocalypse is surreal, especially if you’re kind of one of them. Ordinarily, nobody really knows where they’ll be in five years anyway, even without a plague destroying the world — that’s what I’ve learned. You might have a ‘Plan A’ and maybe even a ‘Plan B’, but then all of a sudden you’re living a ‘Plan Z’ and really craving meat.

  I’d thought I’d soon be finishing university, getting an entry-level job at a newspaper, magazine or somewhere that could use an English Lit graduate. I planned to buy a car, save for an overseas experience and, after a few years, meet the man of my dreams, buy a house and maybe have a couple of kids. These all seemed like reasonable plans. It’s not like I wanted to be a movie star or an inventor or anything that takes talent and a lot of luck.

  The future seemed pretty predictable. Everyone I knew had lived the average, normal life, so why would I be any different? I’d been taught: if you work hard, live honestly and within your means, don’t do drugs and don’t break the law, then you’ll be successful in life. I guess those life instructions don’t save you from a plague or from being turned into one of the Undead. If they did, I’d be an eighty-two-year-old woman right now — providing I was still alive.

  Then all of a sudden the world changed and I was a Blue, which is a kind of half-human, half-Zombie. Strange, I know, but that’s what I am. I spent a year pretending to be dead, lying in the desert like a corpse, but eventually I pulled myself off the ground — which wasn’t easy, because during my year of being motionless lots of little vines had started to grow on my clothing. I vaguely remembered their name from school — Cat’s Claw, or something like that. They had beautiful little yellow trumpet flowers, but their roots were quite fibrous and covered my body in a fine mesh. I pulled them off, stood up and looked for something to eat.

  Maybe it was all the horror movies I’d watched in my life, but I thought that I needed to eat raw meat. So I trapped a rabbit with an old blanket that I took from an abandoned car. But then I didn’t know what to do — I’d never killed anything before. After a lot of procrastinating, I smacked the small wriggling lump inside the blanket with a brick, then cried. When I looked inside the blanket it was disgusting, and eating raw meat was difficult. But I ate it all. When I got to the rabbit’s brain, I hoped it would be amazing to me in my new Undead state. It wasn’t. Brains have a terrible texture: mushy and creamy.

  Unfortunately, it took over a year for me to learn that I could eat cooked meat. I could, in fact, eat anything I wanted, but the protein in meat was what I craved and what sustained me. The irony! Another lesson learned — don’t believe everything you see in horror movies about Zombies.

  I lived in an abandoned mansion for a while, but the surviving humans in the area kept intruding on my privacy. I guess they were out looking for supplies and thought my home might have useful things for them. I always hid when they came in, knowing they would kill me, like they killed the other Deads. It was so irritating watching them just go through the collection of clothing and books I’d taken with me, tossing things around and taking all my food.

  Then I decided to travel for a few years and check out the country. These were fun but dangerous times. I would hotwire cars and drive the motorways at crazy speeds. If any surviving humans noticed me, I’d ditch the car and hide. I covered a lot of distance and drove a lot of fancy cars, using siphoned petrol from deserted vehicles. When my car broke down, I’d just pick up another one from an abandoned car dealership. BMW this time, Katie? No, I think I’d prefer a red Mercedes-Benz with a cream interior, thank you.

  I also did a lot of collecting, or looting, as some might call it. If you need something to survive, I think people should call it ‘gathering supplies’. Nobody needs Prada shoes, Gucci handbags or sparkly chocolate-coloured diamonds. But I had tons of them. I guess it was a kind of retail therapy for me. It seemed such a waste to leave such beautiful goodies to rot in the big empty department stores. Maybe I wanted them because I’d always been a poor student and bought most of my clothing from vintage stores, or maybe it was simply that I’m a girl and I couldn’t resist. Anyway, I had to laugh at the cute convertible I was driving one day. It was stuffed to overflowing with wigs, robes, lacy dresses and masks, which I had got from ransacking a costume outlet store. It was like a clown and a unicorn had both thrown up inside my car.

  I’m not sure how many years I drifted around. Eventually I lost a bit of the gypsy urge and returned to my desert. I made my home in a place where humans dare not travel: a low-lying valley filled with the Undead. Of course, I travelled out of the valley to get things to decorate it: paintings by the Old Masters, cool ornate furniture, a canopy bed, Persian rugs and, of course, books. I took carload after carload from the two biggest chain-store booksellers. I had enough books to keep me occupied for a lifetime of reading. Then I thought, If I don’t die, I’ll just read them all again. And scarily enough, that’s what I’m doing.

  XAVIER, late summer, 61 A. Z.

  Dear Rose,

  Sorry I’ve taken so long to write back. I’ll try to make the letter long this time. I’m not really used to this and I’m not much of a writer like you. I like reading time at school, but not writing. My favourite things to do at school are horticulture and science. Also, I like our teacher, old Mr Ding, and his stories. Everyone has heard them a hundred times and we still like them. He mostly tells us about what the world was like before the Plague, like people walking around on the ground, cars, planes, telephones and stuff like that. Sometimes I think he makes things up. He’s in his eighties now. Maybe he doesn’t remember everything or he’s adding stuff to make it more interesting.

  There is an annoying girl named Tash at my school too! She’s really bossy and all the younger kids are scared of her. It’s funny that we both don’t like a Tash.

  My mum said she knows your father from when they were classmates at Desert Camp. She said he was really smart and nice. Maybe that’s why she thinks we’re going to be good friends someday.

  Are you going to go to Desert Camp when you grow up? I don’t know if I really want to go. Old Mr Ding said I have to go if I want to be a scientist. Being a scientist would be interesting, but I kind of like growing things and playing guitar. My friend Jessy doesn’t care one way or the other. Jessy’s family are Gunslingers, so eventually she’ll go to join them out wherever Gunslingers go. Jessy has already been to the ground and ridden horses when the Gunslingers have visited. She said it’s easy and really fun to run them fast along the flat lands. It’s hard to imagine. I’m definitely going to do it someday.

  I saw something really cool and scary last night. My mum is a healer, like I said before, so when people are hurt or sick they bring them to our house
. This guy was brought in who had been bitten by a Dead. Mum tried to stop the disease by cutting off his arm! She put him to sleep with some medicine and then put him in a hammock that hangs out from the platform. It’s pretty steady, not swinging or anything. Then she did surgery on him and injected him with more medicines. He’s still hanging out there, sleeping. Phil, our neighbour, is guarding him in case he turns. If he turns, Phil will have to use a stick and crush in his skull and then cut the hammock’s rope so he falls to the ground. I’ve been trying to hang around to see him turn, but it’s boring waiting.

  When Mum cut off his arm she used one of her old but super-sharp blades to cut the skin and muscle. Then she used a special little saw to cut his bone. Then she burnt the little bleeding spots in the stump. After that she pulled skin into a flap and sewed it all together. It was really gross.

  You wanted me to talk about my house. It’s built in a circle around the trunk of a tree and there are two levels with a ladder in between. My brothers and I sleep on the top level, and Mum and Dad on the bottom level. Our roof is shaped so that rain runs down it into gutters and then a barrel. Hanging off the beams are baskets where my mum grows her medicinal plants and flowers. We have three platforms that stick out. One of these is for peeing off (the one in the back, half-covered in pine branches), one is for laundry and one is for strange things my mum does with the infected (like cutting the guy’s arm off). I think she doesn’t want the blood and stuff to splash into the house.

  We have bridges that connect us to the other houses and community areas. Mostly everyone contributes what they make or grow to the community. Dad says our teamwork is what has made Tree Sanctuary survive and why it’s such a nice place to live. We don’t have goats like you, but Tree Sanctuary has chickens, which we keep on a caged platform. Mostly we just eat their eggs.

  I hope that letter was a bit better than my last one.

  Bye, Xavier

  HELEN, late summer, 61 A. Z.

  THE MAN WAS brought in on what seemed like a tide of people. Three men held him with heavy ropes around his neck and arms. The rest of the group were the man’s friends; their faces were awash with the horror before them. The man himself was beautiful, with olive skin and blue eyes. Tears streaked his face, and his long frame shivered in the knowledge of what likely lay ahead.

  No outcome here would be easy. His captors were alert and ready to spring, their muscles twitching with readiness, their own fears evident in their quick glances at each other as if to remark on the hideousness of the situation. Should he turn, they would have to fling him off the platform to his death. The man’s friends had begged for a chance for him to be seen by the healer, Helen Santos, and had made their way along the rope bridges amongst the trees to her home and clinic.

  Helen stood looking at the group winding its way towards her. She could feel her heart rate increase and a slightly stunning flood of adrenaline course through her body. She knew that once she was actually set to her task, a blissful tunnel vision would set in, allowing her to think clearly and work fast, and put aside her fear. She had received word of the man’s coming ten minutes before, and had readied her tools: anaesthetics, scalpels, a saw and other old surgical implements she had bartered for over the years or managed to make herself.

  Her somewhat brutal methods didn’t always work, but they were the only option a victim had. A bite from a Corpse always ended in death or a state worse than that — the curse of being Undead. The technique Helen used involved removing the bitten body part in the hope this would stop the conversion. Unfortunately, the passage of time affected the outcome for the patient. Despite any effort Helen made to amputate or cut away the infection, if too much time had passed, the disease would continue to transform, and instead of it taking an hour until the patient converted, it became a terrible half-day of screaming and thrashing. Sometimes the process worked, and that was good enough for her, though after the last one, she had decided she would keep the poor person sedated and deeply asleep. She just couldn’t handle the screams anymore. Important as her work was, she knew that there might be a cost someday, either physically or mentally.

  Helen’s jaw was tight and her eyes were narrowed with concentration. She nodded to the man’s captors to tie him to the surgical platform. She started by filling a syringe with a thick white liquid. She was glad she had this strong medicine — nobody needs to be awake when they have their arm amputated.

  ROSE, late summer, 61 A. Z.

  Dear Xavier,

  Your letter was great!

  I can’t believe your mum cut off a guy’s arm! Did he turn? Was he upset his arm was gone? I told my friends at school and they don’t believe it either. How did he get bitten in the first place? Aren’t the trees you live in high enough off the ground?

  My nanny, Beth, didn’t get your letter first this time or she would never have let me read it. We’re not even allowed books with what she calls ‘adult messages’. Beth especially doesn’t like us to talk about the Infected or the ground. I guess she’s like Mother that way, except Mother doesn’t like us to talk at all. ‘No useless chatter!’ She wants us to be ladies, to sit nicely and only speak of ‘pleasant’ things.

  When Mother is being crazy, I try to stay at school or go to Oscar’s house. His mum is really sweet and lets us do whatever. Oscar and I are going to make our own hang-out, a secret place that is just our own. Maybe it will be somewhere in the building he lives on. It’s made of brick-type stuff and, most importantly, has lots of windows. My building is mostly made of glass, which means it would be nearly impossible to enter from the outside. Getting into the buildings from the inside is not an option. Like I said before, they were boarded up years ago to keep the Infected from getting to the top floors. Unfortunately, it keeps us from going down into the buildings, too.

  Okay, I’ve got to go.

  Rose

  LUKAS, late summer, 61 A. Z.

  LUKAS OPENED HIS eyes, a rush of fear surging through his body. Even in his sleep he knew he was in trouble and had tried to wake himself, but couldn’t quite surface. He had been dreaming of insects cutting into him, stealing from him, drinking his blood. Then, as he was finally waking, he found himself in a new nightmare. He was hung high above the ground, trapped in a sling made of coarse ropes. The light filtering through the trees seemed too bright, his mouth was desperately dry and his body throbbed. But worse was the sensation in his chest. It felt almost hollow, like an empty room.

  He listened carefully to the noises around him trying to recall what had happened. He was carried here … then there was what? It came back — a heavyset guard. But, before that, there was a Dead, out at the orchard, and he’d thought it looked like the really slow kind. And he was supposed to meet that gorgeous girl tonight … was that tonight? What time was it?

  He remembered slipping from the branch he was standing on. All the apples fell. They were beautiful, he remembered thinking, as he himself was falling too. Lying there amongst the apples, bright little globes against the dark ground, he stared up into the grey sky. A shadow. He tried to get away. Then the shock of it! He couldn’t believe he would die that way … But wait, did the Dead really bite him? Lukas remembered jerking his arm out of its mouth and thinking that its teeth hadn’t been able to break his skin. He’d felt sick, couldn’t catch his breath and his eyes felt dim. Then somebody had taken him to the healer.

  Oh no …

  Lukas looked down at where his arm had been. He blinked and shook his head to clear his vision. Anger burned from within him, bubbling up into his throat, gagging him until it came out in a scream. ‘No!’

  He struggled within the harness until he was exhausted, and looked again at the place where his arm had been. The sheer enormity of the loss fell on him, pulling him into a dark place within himself.

  ‘Hello there.’ He heard a soft voice call out to him. It was hard to turn his head to see who was speaking, but at last he made out a woman contemplating him from the platform nearby. ‘
Are you in pain?’

  ‘What have you done?’ He strained against the ropes again, but realised the futility of his efforts and dropped his head to his chest. He felt strange, as if he were forgetting something. Think, think what’s wrong here? My arm? No, it’s something else. It’s … my breathing. Lukas felt no desire to take a breath. Hesitantly he put his hand on his chest and waited. Nothing. Nothing.

  He looked back at the platform, mouth open. The woman was watching him. ‘I know, dear, you’re not breathing. I tried to keep the sickness from turning you, but I’m sorry to say that we were only partly successful.’

  ‘What … what does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I’ve only seen one before, but I think you’re a Blue.’

  KATIE, about 5 A. Z. to 61 A. Z.

  I WAS LIVING Plan Z. Well, a version of it anyway. This was uncharted territory, except for what I’d seen in horror movies and they weren’t completely honest about how it would really be — like not fancying brains, for example.

  Nobody knows what it’s going to be like when they find themselves Undead, but there I was — slightly blue-looking, not breathing, and with nothing except time on my hands. So I did some silly things, I’m ashamed to say. One of my more embarrassing projects involved trying to understand my infected brothers and sisters. This was futile, but mildly entertaining … and smelly.

  Armed with bags of meat, I hoped to buy their friendship. Out into the valley I went, driving in my shiny blue Mustang, looking for a nice (ha!) Zombie to do something with. I’m not sure what I was thinking I’d accomplish — maybe one of them would be less stupid than the others and it could become my sidekick? Or maybe it would be trainable, like a large, ugly dog — the kind that rolls in road kill and is strictly an outdoor friend.