Sleep, Think, Die, page 18
“Rumble too? You both worked here? But I don’t get it,” Lavender said, in that infuriating way she had of not knowing when to drop a subject, “If it was that bad then why come back here now?”
Fair question, Carson thought, though he hadn’t had the nerve to ask it.
“It all changed when I got to your town, Lavender. Things had gone quiet for a bit. Nobody down your way seemed to know that zombies were a real thing, not the result of some drug addled imaginings. By then, the news was so sanitised there was never any mention of them. Even me and Rumble had started to hope that maybe they were dying off, no need for any intervention on anyone’s part. After all, how long can a rotting corpse remain ambulant for before dropping down properly dead, we reasoned. And in the meantime, we needed money to eat and survive. Both of us being obviously fit and handy in a fight we had no trouble getting casual work with a local security firm. That night at the pub was only our second week working for them. We had started to get comfortable, to believe things really would be okay after all. How wrong we were,”
“Ryan died that night,” Lavender said, her voice low and threatening as she spoke of her dead boyfriend.
“I know and believe me Lavender, I am sorry. It was the events of that night that made me decide it was time to stop running. I’ll never forget the broken look on your face when we pulled you out from under his body, or how we all sat in my car like four hollow souls afterwards, all of us devastated. I remember my hands trembling so badly I couldn’t release the steering wheel. I knew then that it was time to come back and finish this once and for all, if I could find a way to do it. It’s taken me long enough, but I think I know what to do now,”
“You mean to tell me that all the time we were on the road, you were deliberately leading us back to the very spot where it all began?” Bumper said.
Gasher shrugged again, “Yes,” he said simply.
“Why didn’t you just let us go our own way?” Bumper’s voice was raised.
“You never showed any inclination to go off on your own, you never complained,” Gasher said, “Besides, safety in numbers and all that. We were a good little team, for a while. I knew I could keep you both safe if you just stayed with me. After what happened that night in the pub I felt I owed you that. It’s not true to say all of this is my fault, but I sure as hell played my part,”
“And that’s why you like it so much?” Even in the low firelight Lavender’s eyes were flashing, her anger evident in her voice, “Killing zombies I mean? That’s why you always got such a rush when you took one on? To you, it’s like some kind of revenge, isn’t it?”
“I have to admit it always feels good taking one down, yes,”
“They were all people once, before you and your employers got hold of them!”
“But they’re not anymore and that’s the point! There’s no room for compassion and sentimentality when you’re faced with a zombie. You have one objective; to kill. That’s it. Anything else is just bullshit and distraction! Anything else and you’re dead!”
“That’s why you always said about getting the medulla oblongata, isn’t it?” Bumper asked suddenly, a thought just occurring to him, “It’s something to do with the intelligent ones, the Thinkers, right? The most certain, effective way of finishing them off is to sever the medulla oblongata?”
Gasher gave a wry smile, “Not exactly. The thinking part of the brain is the cerebral cortex, the forehead to you and me. Not easy to get at when you are reaching up to try and hit a zombie approaching the seven-foot mark, sometimes even taller, unless you happen to be swinging a long-handled axe or something. Plus, with a reach longer than your legs, to get within accurate hitting distance is a death wish for most people, and it carries the distinct disadvantage of having to be in front of the zombie in order to hit it. I repeated the refrain ‘medulla oblongata’ in front of you as a means of teaching you a quick way to take a zombie down from behind, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty that is. Glad it seems to have worked,”
“You could have told us all this on the road!” Lavender spat, “We had plenty of time to talk. You could have told us all of this ages ago!”
“Would you have come along with me if I had?” Gasher asked.
Lavender fell silent, her eyes over-bright, tears forming there to remain unspilled. She was fighting back her emotions but confusion raged across her features.
“The good old medulla oblongata,” Gasher said, filling in the silence, “The area of the brain that controls respiration and heartbeat, amongst other things, but which also connects the higher levels of the brain to the spinal cord. If you can slice through it, you’re pretty much guaranteed to kill anyone, never mind a zombie, though these days I am developing a preference for blowing the whole brain to smithereens, just to be sure,” he patted the gun he had most recently used on the zombie version of Phil, “If nothing else, it’s very satisfying,”
Carson remembered the fragments of skull on the ground before him, Phil-zombie’s torn neck bleeding onto his foot. He felt sick. Turning his revulsion aside, he realised there was another question he wanted to ask Gasher, just in case there was no time later, or ever again.
“So where did you go? After the fire, I mean? We thought you were dead,”
“Ah!” Gasher said, looking up, still stroking the gun absent-mindedly, “I meant to tell you about that.”
*
“I was cornered in that bloody bunker. Trapped with a Thinker, a room full of explosives and a hand grenade that maniac Lucas had just thrown into the mix. There wasn’t time to kill the Thinker and then escape. I had to think pretty damn fast myself! The grenade rolled up against my boot. I noticed the Thinker watching it with what looked like interest, so I picked it up and tossed it to him, in the hopes that it would try to catch it instinctively. It did, and while it was absorbed with its new toy I rammed it backwards as hard as I could, catching it off guard enough to send it flying over a pile of weaponry and into the wall. I didn’t stay to see what happened, I just got the hell out of there and ran for cover.”
“I thought I was clear, I swear. I had every intention of catching up with the rest of you, but I had to have a change of plan,”
“Which was?” Carson encouraged him.
“Which was, I hadn’t escaped at all, not really. The Thinker must have ducked out of there pretty much on my heels, because it was behind me, following me would you believe it?”
“Oh God,” Carson said, thinking back to the horrific kill he had witnessed before he almost became one himself, trapped in the ceiling of Gino’s Gym and Bar, “It was hunting you. I’ve seen it before. It never usually ends well,”
“Right, well it nearly didn’t turn out too good for me either. The explosion went up, throwing me forward flat on my face in the dirt. I had a heart-stopping moment when I expected the Thinker to be on top of me any second, but it didn’t happen. I got up quick and turned around, hoping it had gone, only to find it standing right in front of me, its clothes, skin and what was left of its hair alight. It was patting its hands up and down its body stupidly, like a slow kid playing a game of heads, shoulders, knees and toes. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so damn weird. Then it saw me standing there, forgot its game, and came for me again.”
“They don’t run, but with their height their stride is pretty big. It gained on me a lot faster than it should have been able to. No matter where I ran, it was right there behind me. Then I turned around one last time and it was gone, just like that,”
Carson felt his stomach turn. He knew that wasn’t the last Gasher would have seen of that Thinker.
“How come you didn’t just kill it?” Lavender asked dully.
Gasher spread his arms wide in response, “I was out of weapons,”
“That never stopped you before,” Lavender said.
“She’s right,” Bumper added, “I’ve seen you tear zombie’s throats out with barely a second thought,”
“Thinkers are taller than your average zombie, I thought I had already explained that,” Gasher sounded mildly impatient.
“That’s not it,” Lavender said, “You’re lying to us again,”
“I’ve never lied to you,” Gasher’s voice was suddenly full of warning.
“You’ve kept stuff from us,” Lavender shot back, “A lie of omission is still a lie!”
“What do you want me to say?” Gasher asked
“The truth,” Lavender said, “Why didn’t you just kill it?”
For the second time since they had sat together, Gasher looked faintly embarrassed. He looked around them, their faces becoming harder to see as night fell more fully and the fire at last began to die, “Okay I’ll tell you why. I was trying to lead it away from you, all right? Happy now? I knew you were hiding out somewhere and the last thing I wanted to do was lead a Thinker right to where you were. Not after everything we’ve all been through. All right?”
It was a rebuke, and Lavender’s face showed it. In the gloom, it was just possible to see her shame as she drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them and buried her face within.
“You’re saying it just gave up the hunt and let you be?” Carson asked, interested to know the outcome despite Lavender’s discomfort.
Gasher grinned, “Come on Carson, you of all people should know better than that! Of course it didn’t, it tried to catch me by surprise,”
“Like the Phil-zombie did to us in the woods?” Bumper supplied.
“Exactly like that!” Gasher agreed, “I had started to allow myself to believe it had actually gone, when there it was again, larger than life and with a vicious gleam in its eye. It stepped down from a porch as I was passing a house, and went for me,”
Next to Carson, Lavender gave a shudder. From the depths of her knees, buried under her arms, she said, “We hid out on one of those porches for a while,”
“Not a great hiding place, you’re losing your touch,” Gasher joked gently. Lavender didn’t respond.
“Then what?” Bumper prompted, “You ripped its throat out?”
Gasher sighed, “How many times do I have to tell you, you don’t rip throats out of zombies that are a foot or more taller and with a reach like Stretch Armstrong! No, I had picked up a little improvised weaponry on the way, hadn’t I?”
“Oh?” Carson enquired.
“Yeah. Once you’ve knocked them on their backs, you’d be surprised how effective an ordinary, innocent looking garden spade can be at decapitating a zombie.”
“Only if there’s a madman on the other end of it,” Lavender muttered from the depths of her current hiding place.
Gasher laughed, a mildly infectious sound and all the more surprising, coming from him.
“What do you suppose happened to Lucas?” Carson mused aloud.
Gasher shrugged, “Don’t know, don’t much care, he just better not cross my path ever again, even if he’s a zombie by now,”
There was no trace of a smile on Gasher’s face now. The laughter had died a sudden death.
What Goes Around…
The fire cooled and died. Bumper finally gave into his exhaustion and fell into a fitful sleep. Lavender emerged from her hiding place and curled up in a foetal position alongside him, careful not to touch his damaged arm. Every now and then when he became especially fevered, she would reach up to place a small, cool hand on his brow and murmur to him as if he were a child.
Carson had never felt more wide-awake. Becoming cramped sitting where he was, he took to strolling the edges of the clearing, keeping a distance from the locked shelter hatch in case it was suddenly flung open. Gasher sat like a statue, implacable and solid in the depths of the night.
Carson had reached the fallen section of fencing. He squatted, squinting at the signage on it. There was movement behind him. His heart leapt as he turned, ready to shout for help at the unexpected presence of a zombie at his back.
It was Gasher. Carson fought to keep his fists at his sides, adrenalin racing. How could a man so big move so silently, he wondered. When he spoke his voice was low and calm, an achievement given how shaken he was.
“You could have warned me it was you,”
“Sorry,” Gasher said, not sounding like he meant it.
“No problem,” Carson said, his irritation dying. Gasher’s closeness was making him uncomfortable.
“I wanted to talk to you alone.”
Dread washed through Carson. Whatever this was about, it wasn’t going to be anything good. “Okay?” he prompted.
“I told you I think I’ve found a way to put a stop to all this, I think I should point out that it’s not going to be an overnight cure. We are going to have to make it our mission to wipe out Thinkers wherever they are to be found, to prevent them passing on the effects of the serum and creating more Thinkers in turn. The other zombies are neither here nor there, really. They’ll die soon enough anyway, especially if they are starved of meat. What we are going to do here, today, once that hatch is opened, is to treat the root cause of the problem. Then we can deal with the symptoms,”
Carson nodded, “The root cause being?” He felt he already had a good idea what it might be.
Gasher took a step closer, intimidating in his size and mass next to Carson, “That caged zombie you saw in the shelter? That’s the root cause. The creator of this whole damned charade, overdosed on his own serum and no doubt getting harder and harder to confine day by day. That caged zombie, is Christiansen.”
*
Carson sucked in the cold night air between his teeth, making them tingle. His suspicions had been right but he checked anyway, “Are you sure? You never saw it,”
“I’m as sure as I can be. Nothing else makes sense. It has to be him, or what’s left of him. Besides, the fact that Glenda is here, watching over him, keeping this crazy experiment alive along with him, is a good indication that I’m right. Glenda is Christiansen’s wife,”
“She’s his wife! Jesus, Gasher! She really was holding back when we had our little heart to heart then,”
“Do you remember anything else from that conversation?”
“No,” Carson shook his head, frowning, “but I do recall she referred to the three of us as being ready-made meals in her own larder. I think I understand what she meant by that a little better now, especially having seen what they did to Phil. She meant to feed us, or parts of us, to the zombie you say is Christiansen, in order to keep him alive, right? Presumably they are still pumping him full of his serum, which would explain why he has become so grotesquely huge. They were going to let him take a bite out of us, nourishing him whilst passing the serum on to us in the process, then they were going to dump us somewhere hereabouts and let nature – or not – take its course. We would either have become Thinkers, or plain old zombies. I’m hoping we never find out which,”
“I think you’ve pretty much got the idea,” Gasher said grimly, “They must have been doing this all this time, which would explain why the density of numbers in and around this town is far more concentrated than further afield. I found that much out at least, when I tried to run away and stick my head in the sand,”
“But they are still out there, far from here?” Carson asked softly.
“I reckon they are, yes. There must be an especially virulent strain of this serum that is surviving in certain hosts and which is still, undoubtedly, being passed on,”
“Which isn’t going to make our job any easier when this is done,”
For the first time since he had known him, Gasher displayed a genuine token of friendship. He laid his large, meaty hand on Carson’s shoulder and squeezed.
“I like your optimism. You really believe we are going to take down Christiansen, not to mention Glenda and Harry, then go out into the big, bad world and become Thinker Hunters? I can respect that Carson. I’m not sure I can believe it, but I can respect it,”
Carson blanched, “You don’t think we’ll survive?”
“Who knows? I know I’ll die trying,”
Carson was too absorbed to appreciate the dark little joke. “If we die, how will anyone know what to do to stop them? We have to survive! We have a purpose now! We could end all this, help repair the world!”
“Listen to the superhero talking!” Gasher was only half-mocking, “You better make sure you come out of this in one piece then, literally,”
“And you?”
“Oh, you ought to know me by now Carson. Once my blood’s up, just about anything can happen. I’ll either make it or I won’t, but I give you my word now that if I die, then that sick, twisted Christiansen is coming with me,”
“So who’s Harry? Their son?”
“Nothing as nice and neat as that, I’m afraid. He’s just another employee, like I was. Difference is he had the balls to stay and face all this down all these years. It’ll almost be a shame, killing him,”
*
The skies were beginning to lighten again when the four of them, Bumper and Lavender, groggy and dry-throated, made a plan of sorts. Gasher asked Carson if he’d had time to explore any of the ante-rooms that led off the corridors.”
“Only one and I was hardly exploring it, I was hiding in it,” He explained, “I wouldn’t call them rooms either. The one I was in was more like a walk-in broom cupboard,”
“Some of them are bigger than others,” Gasher said knowingly, “The narrower the corridor becomes, the smaller the ante-room accordingly is. One of the larger ones, nearest the intersection of the corridors, is full of weapons. At least, it used to be. Me and Rumble made off with a fair few when we left. Doubtless one or two others had a similar idea. We might be in luck though, maybe there’s still something in there worth taking,”
“Not much use to us out here,” Lavender said in her scornful way. Carson and Gasher had already explained the need to get inside and kill the occupants to Lavender and Bumper. They had told them the whole story, including the wider mission of actively hunting down and killing off Thinkers when they were finished here. Neither of them had been happy about it.
