“Of course, come on.” She leads, darting behind another building before we get to a small bunker to the left of the facility. Was this the underground research centre Hazeldine had mentioned when we first got here and then never spoke of again? That man was so full of secrets, he was like a teenage girl’s diary.
The group feed into the bunker, and after a moment, the sound dies down, and quietly, we sneak inside the bunker just as a large door on the far end begins to slide closed. Mia tugs my arm, almost out of its bloody socket, as she drags us through.
“That was close.” She almost chuckles, the adrenaline kicking in as she gives me a quick kiss on the lips.
“Too close,” I reply and show her my T-shirt, the fabric trapped in the door.
She bites her lip and pulls an apologetic face, shrugging, but I grin at her, and she relaxes. A voice carries up a flight of stairs, and I indicate that we need to go down.
“Come on,” I whisper.
We creep down the stairs and find ourselves at the end of a long corridor, we push on, and I’m wondering just how big the facility is as we reach three doors.
“Let’s just pick the middle one,” Mia says in hushed tones as a shaking hand reaches for the handle.
I can hear a muted buzz behind that door, a sign of people talking, and I think it’s a bad idea just to walk into a room full of people when we shouldn’t be here.
“Let’s go left.” I open the door before she can argue with me and slip inside.
We’re greeted by silence, and a dim glowing light marks out a path on the floor. It’s complete darkness other than the markings on the floor, and we can’t see a thing. I feel Mia behind me, reaching out as her fingers touch my shoulder before she turns.
“This is ridiculous,” Mia huffs as she searches the wall for a light, and with a soft click, the room is filled with a blinding brightness. I cover my eyes for a second before turning to look at Mia, her mouth is hanging open, her face etched with horror.
We’re surrounded by giant glass tube things filled with liquid, and in each one is a zombie. It looks like some shitty space film crossed with a horror movie as all that rotting flesh is magnified by the water solution they’re in. I step closer to the nearest one and tap the glass, the creature inside doesn’t move, but it’s milky, decaying eyes seem to follow me. So they aren’t dead then, just stuck, suspended, or whatever the fuck they are. What the hell is Hazeldine up to in here, and why is he keeping zombies in glass jars like some sort of sick psychopath?
Chapter Eighteen
Mia
I’m speechless. I have no words to describe what we’re seeing. How could I? This wasn’t normal. We were supposed to keep them out of the base, not trap them like fireflies in jars. I move slowly between the glass cylinders, and I can feel their eyes on me as I walk. I notice that each tube thing has a chart attached to the bottom. I pick up the closest one and flick through. A lot of it I don’t understand, but some of it there is no ignoring. I look at the zombie in front of me, and I feel sick. The chart says that she has been here for three months; they’ve been charting the rate of her decay with graphic details that turn my stomach. Her skin decaying was at a slower rate than older zombies, it has only now begun to become loose. The chart says that those affected in the original outbreak only lasted a month before their skin cells broke down like that. Now, it’s three months. Three months. They were evolving, adapting, learning to live longer. We were taught back at Rosehill that bacteria and cells adapted to survive, but that the process could take hundreds of years. This was all developing in the space of a year. I can’t stop myself from shivering, and I breathe out slowly as Alex places a hand on my shoulder in an effort to comfort me. This is the terrifying world we lived in now. This was the danger we faced, and no matter what we did, it seemed like they always found a way to soldier on, the need to live stronger than anything.
“We need to leave,” Alex says in a hushed tone as we hear footsteps approaching.
Leave? We hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface here, we’d been through one door—what did the other two hide? I shake my head. I am done with the secrets and lies; I’m tired and worn down. This is not how I wanted to live. I put the chart back and stand with my arms folded across my chest.
“Come on, Mia.” Alex tries to pull at me, grabbing my arm first and then snaking an arm around my waist as though he intends to carry me out of here. I am not moving, I want to know what’s going on. I want to speak to my father.
“Fuck,” he hisses as a door at the end of the room opens.
A man in a white lab coat steps into the room and begins checking his little experiments, and when he finally looks up from his clipboard and notices us, he screams for help. Two soldiers burst into the room, guns drawn and aimed at us. My heart is hammering in my chest, and for a moment, I am more scared of these men than the monsters behind the glass.
One of them lowers his slowly, squinting as though he’s trying to place us before finally he realises. “Mia Hazeldine? What’re you doing down here?”
I place my hands on my hips. “I think you’d better call my father.”
The man nods before he escorts us through the door and past the main lab. It really was like something from a film set, everything was brightly lit and spotlessly clean. Glass beakers were filled with strange-looking potions, Bunsen burners hissed and spat out flames, and under it all, I could hear zombies groaning. It was like my ears had become so accustomed to listening out for that sound, I could hear it despite all the other noises.
“What exactly are you doing down here?” Alex growls as we walk past a window that shows a zombie being prodded with a long metal stick by a soldier while two men in lab coats take notes.
It’s the scientist who responds this time. “It’s classified.”
“It’s risky.” Alex snorts, he’s angry about what we’re seeing, and I don’t blame him. It was a stupid idea, keeping zombies under the feet of the people they’re supposed to be protecting. “Are you really willing to kill everyone here for it?”
“Yes.” The scientist pushes his glasses further up his nose and looks away.
“If the doc can get this right, we’ll be able to save everyone in Litchfield—the whole UK, even.” The soldier flashes me a tight smile, he truly believes that there is a way out of this, and he’s willing to risk everyone else to achieve it. Zealots are always dangerous.
“So, you’re trying to work on a cure?” I ask. My father said that a cure wasn’t possible, but his men obviously had different ideas.
“Yes. The vaccine is almost ready, but it won’t be effective for long. We need to be thinking ahead.” He opens an office door and gestures for us to go inside.
“The mutating…” I whisper, and he nods. No matter how quickly they work, the virus was always two steps ahead, and now, the race is on to try and get in front and stop the evolution of these creatures. If we didn’t, we stood no chance.
Alex and I take a seat while the soldier guards the door outside to stop us from wandering anywhere else.
“This isn’t right…” Alex murmurs as he looks around the room. On the board, there are documents and maps, but before he can stand to get a closer look, my father strides in, his face sombre.
He sits and slams his hands down on the desk. “I should have known you two would find your way down here.”
I frown. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He almost chuckles. “It means Mia, Mi Amour, you always manage to find trouble.”
My heart warms as he calls me his love like he used to when I was little. “I do not—”
He holds up his hand to silence me. “I placed you in a secure school and then sent guarded buses to fetch you when everything went to shit. Were you on it? No. You went all Hunger Games and survived for a year like a wild woman.”
“I…” I can’t dispute that. I close my mouth.
“Then you make it here, and I offer you safety and security, but you ar
e bored by it. I know you hate watching the children, the others tell me. So, of course, naturally, you end up down here where danger is rife and there are things you shouldn’t know.” He sighs as he rubs his face, and that’s when I realise how worn down my father is. His hair is greying, and the lines on his face are deeper; he looks exhausted, and I don’t know how I feel about that.
“I wish I could say it was his fault,” he nods at Alex, who protests. “But it isn’t. You have always been exactly like your mother.”
My mother. She whom we do not speak of except in vague statements. Yet more secrets and shadows fill my life.
Chapter Nineteen
Alex
Hazeldine gives me a hard look before he tells us to go back to bed. He promises to talk to us again tomorrow and explain what’s going on here, but I don’t trust him. There’s something on the periphery, lingering on the edge of my mind that’s been annoying me. Why is there a research base at Litchfield? How long has it been here?
Mia is strangely silent as we go back to our room, her hand clasped tightly in mine. Was it the mention of her mother? She never talked about her, and I didn’t want to push. We get into bed, still saying nothing. It isn’t until she lies facing me in the darkness that she finally gives a voice to some of her thoughts.
“I can’t wrap my head around it. How is my father so involved in finding a cure? He’s just a colonel. A soldier.” Mia sighs as her hand finds my hip, and she shuffles closer.
“I don’t know.” I run my hand up her back, fingers tracing circles on warm skin. She loves it when I do this, and even in the dark, I’m sure her eyelids are closing. “How do you think the vaccine works?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice is heavy, and I know she’s starting to drift.
“It’s just odd.”
“What do you mean?” she murmurs, and I know she won’t last much longer. She places a soft kiss on my lips before snuggling into me.
“Did you see any animals down there?”
“No…” She’s too tired to get what I’m asking.
“So, what the hell are they testing it on?” I say to myself over her soft snores. I fall asleep gradually, my mind full of horrible, bleak thoughts I wish were only fantasy.
I wake alone, but Mia’s left me a note saying she’s gone to talk with her father and that she’ll be back later. I guess I’m not the only one still struggling to process. I get dressed quickly and grab Donovan for breakfast; Lee is already out on duties. We sit down with our trays, porridge and flatbread, just like we have every other morning since we’d arrived here.
“Spill, what do you know?”
He lets out a breath. “Man, I don’t know shit. I just bring in the Z’s, and they lock them up in the research facility. I guess they must be experimenting on them.”
“Z’s?” I raise an eyebrow and grin at him.
“Zombies, it’s what the soldier’s call them, and it’s kind of sticking.” He chuckles, and for a second, I think about how well he fits in here. In another life, he probably would’ve excelled at being a soldier or even a mercenary. It would have meant something, gotten him somewhere, but now, everyone was just trying to survive, and there were no ranks to work your way up.
“What’s with Hazeldine?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is he really some hero trying to save the day?”
“I doubt it…your future father in law has his finger in too many pies.”
I sit back for a moment and sip on my weak, tepid tea. “He was involved in the initial outbreak, wasn’t he?”
Donovan pulls a face and shrugs, he can’t confirm anything. He is still a newbie like me, but things just don’t add up. How did Hazeldine know to send those coaches to Rosehill on the morning of the outbreak? How did they have this amazing super facility for finding a potential cure? The man was so focused on fixing everything I had no doubt that he had a hand in the original outbreak. Maybe he even helped coordinate it or his scientists developed the virus designed to get rid of lower classes. There was just something that didn’t sit right for me, and I didn’t trust him even though Mia did. And how could she not? He was her father.
“Okay man, so what do you know?” I ask casually, trying not to draw the attention of the soldiers behind us. I swear, everywhere we turned, there was someone in uniform, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say Hazeldine was trying to keep a close eye on us.
He leans forward, and there’s a glimmer of fear in his eyes. “They’re tracking the mutations, and mate, it ain’t like anything you’ve ever seen.”
“How bad is it?” I don’t know why I asked, it had to be pretty bad for cool-as-cucumber Donovan to be bothered.
He plays with the spoon. “They think it's rare right now, but if we don’t get that vaccine out within the next three months, we could be in some serious shit. It’s not just the fact they’re decaying slower, their bodies are changing. Their brains, even.”
“What does that mean?” How can a dead brain change? What kind of super virus did they create?
“It means that the playing field is about to be tipped in their favour.” His voice stays even, like he isn’t telling us that the human race as a whole is doomed to extinction by walking corpses.
“Fuck,” I spit as I put my head in my hands.
“Yeah.”
Neither of us say anything. What is there to say right now? We had no choice but to get that vaccine out while the mad genius scientists, who possibly created this problem to begin with, tried to find a way to fix it. We needed more time.
Donovan stands. “I’ve got to go, mate. I’m out on an actual raid today. Need anything?”
“Yeah, actually,” I say, handing him a scrap of paper. He wasn’t supposed to bring back anything that wasn’t necessary, but it was handy having a friend who was part of the raiding team. Especially since decent tea and condoms were not considered necessary by many in the post-apocalypse world.
Donovan looks at my list and grins. “Trust you to fall in love during the end of the world.”
He tucks it into his shirt pocket and leaves me wondering why Litchfield seemed central to everything. I finally clear my tray away and decide that maybe it’s time I had a closer look at Hazeldine’s cork boards. Let’s see what the sneaky bastard was planning.
Chapter Twenty
Mia
I woke early after a restless sleep. I had too many questions, too many wild thoughts running through my head. Why was my father hiding the vaccine from us? He mentioned it when we arrived but then nothing. He put Donovan and Lee in jobs that allowed them access and knowledge but placed Alex and I as far away as he could. Why? Why? Why was why the prevailing word these days?
I walk to my father’s quarters and knock on the door; he opens, looking tired but says nothing as he lets me in. I sit on the small sofa in his room and firmly say, “We need to talk.”
He rubs his face as he sits at his desk. “What’s the matter?”
I let out a soft sigh. There are so many webs to untangle, so many lies and secrets that I feel like no one knows the truth anymore. I decide to start small, and I pick up the one thread that has been calling to me, the one that has had me on edge for a while now.
I take a deep breath before starting. “I have so many, many questions. But first, I think you owe me an explanation.”
“About what?” My father looks nervous, like he knows what’s coming, but he wants to avoid it.
“Mum.”
He blinks slowly. “Your mother?”
“It’s just been you and I for a long time, and I accepted that. But before the outbreak, you started mentioning her more, not talking about her, just mentioning her in passing. And since I’ve been here, I’ve noticed it too.”
He sits back in his chair, his face has shut down. It’s like there’s nothing behind his eyes as he calmly says, “Mia, I just miss her is all.”
“No, that’s not it,” I frown. “You’re lying to my face.”
/>
He sits forward again, his face still blank, but his nostrils flare slightly. I’ve never spoken to my father like this before, never called him out on his bullshit, but I was done being trapped in this web of lies.
I push a little harder. “Mum was a scientist. You happen to work at a science facility. Then throw in a zombie virus that wipes out most of the population. There’s more to it, and you are lying to me about it.”
A minute of silence passes between us, and I can see the struggle starting to show on his face. “Fine.”
He stands, and with his hands clasped behind his back, looking every inch the soldier he is, he begins pacing in the small space. He doesn’t look at me. “Your mother invented the initial project; it was her life’s work before she got sick.”
“She died of cancer.” My voice is tight, like my throat is threatening to close up. I don’t remember much about my mother’s death, I just know she was too sick to have visitors. Too sick to say goodbye. I don’t recall much about her life either, she was always working. They both were. Her funeral was all I really remembered as I’d been taken out of school and made to wear a scratchy black dress to say goodbye to a woman I barely knew.
He coughs nervously. “No, she died of exposure. She was the first.”
My mother was the first exposed to the virus? That wasn’t possible.
“But mum died over ten years ago…”
He keeps pacing, still avoiding my gaze. “They documented her death, used it as the basis for the whole project. They’ve spent a decade refining the virus, and still, it all went wrong.” He lets out a sharp chuckle, which barely contains his anger.
“Did she do it on purpose?” Had my mother injected herself? Had she gotten sick deliberately? Did she turn into one of those monsters?
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