Undead (9780545473460) (11 page)

Pete's mouth twitches. “Done. If this really is the breakdown of society as we know it, currency will become useless. But whatever.”

Smitty bashes the lock of the cupboard like he's bashing Pete's head. The lock falls off easily, the metal door swings open.

There are three shelves. The bottom one is full of boxed files. The top shelf holds a cash box and a large ball made of rubber bands. But it is the middle shelf that we are all looking at.

Six small TV screens and a large black box that looks like a DVR sit on the shelf. They are all switched on. Images of the café, shop, and entrance, two different views of the parking lot, and one of the office are displayed. And on the final screen we can see ourselves from above, huddled around the cabinet.

Pete turns to the camera in the corner of the room. He smiles and waves at us on the screen.

“I'll take that fifty quid now, Smitty,” he says.

My life through a lens.

On screen, my hair looks shameful. Like I have the mange. I quell the urge to primp in front of the camera. Alice shows no such restraint, and she doesn't even need to primp.

“This proves nothing.” Smitty is adamant. “Just because there are security cameras recording doesn't mean anyone's watching us. The tapes are for robberies, or whatever. Why else would that tosser Gareth have been guarding his cash register with a baseball bat?”

He's right, of course. It doesn't prove a thing — and what's more, if there were people spying on us, why on earth would they leave the TVs here for us to see? Even so, this is way high-tech for a roadside café. My skin is crawling.

“It's good for one thing, though.” Smitty grins at Pete and Alice. “We get to check up on your stories.”

“What do you mean?” Alice curls her lip.

Smitty points to the DVR. “Like Petey said: We've got it all recorded. What happened here, when and how.”

A shudder runs through me. One thing to hear about it, another altogether to see it, up close and from multiple angles.

Pete fiddles with some buttons and manages to rewind the recordings to the beginning. Each screen has a time and date at the bottom. It seems they're on a 24-hour loop; a couple of hours later and we wouldn't have got to see anything. But lucky us, we're just in time.

I close the blind on the window so we can see more clearly, and we crowd in a semicircle, sitting on some of the boxes of disinfectant. My right shoulder is pressed against Smitty's leather-jacketed left shoulder, and as we lean toward the screens his hand brushes mine. He's warm. I can't help feeling grudgingly grateful for his presence. It must be shell-shock. Can't think of any other reason why I'd feel that way.

“Let the show begin.”

Pete has managed to find a ruler and points it at the various screens to alert us to the action. It's kind of annoying, but I suppose it's his little reward for Being Right.

The TV screens show black-and-white footage, no sound.

“Not exactly full of customers, is it?” Smitty chews on his thumbnail.

“No one would come to this place unless they had to,” Alice says.

The timestamp on the screens reads 1:43
P.M
. About ten minutes before we arrived in the bus, by my estimate. There's a young couple paying their bill at a table by the door, a mother and toddler sitting with a teenage girl eating chips-not-fries, and two men wearing checkered shirts and jeans — builders or road workers, maybe. A couple of cooks are visible behind the kitchen counter, there's a waiter and waitress, and a woman behind the register in the shop.

I spot a random guy arriving with a cart, struggling with the main door.

“Bet that's Carrot Man before he costumed up,” I say.

As one, we lean in to check him out. He seems average enough. He walks through the café, pushing the cart and dragging a large trash bag.

“What's in the bag?” Smitty says.

The Man Who Would Be Carrot disappears into the bathroom.

“Must be going to change clothes,” I mutter.

“Thank god there are no cameras in there,” Alice says.

“Oh, don't be coy, Malice.” Smitty leans over me to her. “Bet you love it. Giant vegetable costumes do it for you, don't they?” He twinkles at her and laughs, and she squeals in protest — just the correct amount of righteous indignation, but I can tell she's not entirely hating it. I feel a stab of . . . what is that?
Jealousy?
I'm hit by a wave of nausea and self-loathing. What, I'm jealous of Smitty flirting pathetically with Malice? Really? Please.

Carrot Man emerges from the bathroom, fully carrotted up, with skinny legs sticking out of his furry orange costume.

“Be still your beating heart, Malice.” Smitty's leaning over me to Alice again. She pushes him away before I can.

Carrot Man wheels his cart down the corridor through the café. As he passes the woman behind the register in the little shop, he offers her a sample. She laughs at him and takes a little cup.

“Who's that?” Alice points at a chubby, middle-aged man wearing a shirt and tie, entering the café as Carrot Man clumsily exits. He opens the door for him and makes a shivering motion, telling Carrot Man — if he didn't already know — that it's cold outside.

Carrot Man gives him a sample. He drinks it.

“That's a dead man walking, that's who,” says Smitty.

“It's got to be Gareth's boss,” I say. “He's wearing the same sort of name tag on his shirt.”

The man walks into the shop and talks to the woman at the counter, leaning over, his shirt straining out of his pants in the back. She hasn't drunk her juice yet; it's sitting by the register. He's gesticulating toward the phone. She picks it up and listens, then shakes her head.

“The phone lines are down already!” Pete taps his ruler on the screen excitedly.

Meanwhile, the young couple finishes paying for their meal and leaves. Carrot Man gives them each a sample as they walk past. The woman knocks hers back in one gulp; the guy sips and makes a face, then throws the rest into the snow on the steps as he descends. Guess he didn't like it much; I can't blame him. They walk out into the parking lot, picking their way carefully across the icy pavement and into an awesome Mini Cooper with a British flag painted on the roof.
Shazaam
. . . That's the car that crashed into the back of our bus!

I shake my head as we watch them start up the car. “They nearly escaped. If they had left two minutes earlier, they would have totally missed out on the juice.”

Back in the Cheery Chomper, Gareth's boss is heading out. He feels his back pocket and pulls out a phone.

“Won't work,” predicts Smitty.

It clearly doesn't. But the man doesn't seem too surprised. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes, lights one, and hurries back toward the gas station, skidding in the snow. Before he gets to the pumps, he turns and disappears behind the trees.

“Where'd he go?” Smitty cranes his neck as if he can see around corners on the TV. “Oh, come on, at least show us when he turned!”

We watch, glued, but Gareth's boss has gone.

Back at the Cheery Chomper, Carrot Man is bobbing up and down in the cold. The little boy is wandering around the café; he can see Carrot Man in the entranceway. Too wary to go right up to him, he never-theless is too interested to sit down with his mother and sister. He wanders a few feet closer. Carrot Man spots him and bends over and waves through the glass door. The little boy waves back. Carrot Man holds out a small offering of poison in a plastic cup.
Please don't
, I think.
Leave now, leave while you still can
. Carrot Man opens the door and takes a step toward him. The boy runs back to the table with his mother and sister. I breathe again.

“Hold up!” Pete shouts. “Here we come!”

In the far right of the first screen, our bus appears, passing the couple in the Mini Cooper with the painted roof as they make their way toward the exit. Our bus draws in to the curb at the bottom end of the parking lot. The doors fly open and my recently deceased class begins to unload, buoyant and happy and shivering in the cold air.

“Oh my god, that's me!” Alice cannot contain her glee. “Ugh, I look so fat!” Glee turns to disgust. “This screen is way out of proportion.”

“No, that's what you actually look like, Malice,” Smitty says.

Alice swears at him; he chuckles.

Meanwhile, the mother, daughter, and little boy prepare to leave. There's an awkwardness about the mother and daughter, as if they've had a disagreement.
Yeah, been there, done that.
I hope they're too miffed and distracted to chug some juice as they leave.

At the entrance, Carrot Man is swamped by our classmates, and although the little boy clearly wants to linger, I breathe a sigh of relief as his sister and mother ignore offers of juice and pull him firmly through the crowd and into an old-looking car in the corner of the parking lot. But after a second, the mother is out again and heading back to the Cheery Chomper,
looking more pissed off than ever. Maybe she forgot something? I will her to hurry up and get it, and get the hell out again, but I lose her in the scrum of my classmates.

Most of them are in the café now, all holding little cups from Carrot Man, some in line for snacks, some sitting at tables. We see Pete hiding in the shop, and Mr. Taylor leaving us on the bus and persuading Carrot Man to give him a whole carton of juice as he enters the Cheery Chomper. Carrot Man follows him inside — clearly the cold has won out — and proceeds to shimmy around the tables and give juice to anyone who was lucky enough to miss out the first time. The waiters get their share, the cooks, everyone. Just like Pete said. We watch Alice head toward the bathrooms, just like she said. So far, their stories check out.

Outside, a car comes into view on the road. It's the Mini again.

“Look!” I point to it. “Why have they come back?”

We watch as the Mini gets closer and closer to our bus. And then it jerks to a stop a few feet behind us. The driver's door opens, a figure gets out. It's the guy. It's difficult to see his face from this far away, but it's clear he's panicked; he looks desperately from the bus to the Cheery Chomper, trying to make a decision. His girlfriend makes it for him; she's getting out of the passenger seat and she looks really pissed. Like staggering and dribbling kind of pissed. The man stumbles through the snow toward the bus, dragging his leg like he's injured, and she comes zombie-ing after. Just as he reaches the door, he pauses and she's on him, wrestling him to the ground. She bites.

“Augh!” the four of us yell in unison, like we couldn't see
that
was coming.

Smitty and I share a look, remembering the pool of red in the snow outside the door. Then the man springs up and rounds the front of the bus, pursued by his beloved.

“The hand on the windshield,” I whisper. Smitty nods, silent. We watch the bus shudder as one or both of them get thrown into the side of it. Not kids messing around as we had guessed at the time, but an attack. An attack we could have prevented, had we known what was going on outside? But, of course, how could we?

The man has made it back to the car now. He flings himself into the driver's seat just as his girlfriend reaches the front . . . and just as our driver descends the steps of the bus.

“Monkeyfunster,” Smitty says. “I think this is where our driver gets it.”

Suddenly the screens go blank and the light above us flickers.

Alice squeals.

“What the — ?” Smitty doesn't finish his sentence. The power cuts out, plunging us into darkness. Alice gives another yelp, there's a
thud
, and Pete cries out, too. I grab at Smitty, and he at me, and for one horrible, desperately embarrassing second we fly into each other's arms like Shaggy and Scooby Don't. I immediately propel myself backward, fall over the box that I was sitting on, and land on something soft, fragrant, and screamy.

The lights come back on. I'm lying on top of Alice. Smitty is standing above us, with an expression on his face like he's just been slimed. Pete has managed to shimmy up the side of the cabinet and is sitting on top of it, shaking like a leaf. We all keep absolutely still, and wait to see what happens. Nothing does.

“Nobody panic,” Smitty breathes. “The power goes out all the time in the country. Doesn't mean anything.”

“You sure?” I ask.

“Yeah.” Smitty smiles down at us. “Yowza. Seeing you two like that reminds me of the dream I had last night.” He winks at me.

“Get the hell off me!” Alice pushes me with a strength that belies her skinny frame.

“With pleasure!” I shout, none too brilliantly, scrambling to my feet and avoiding Smitty's gaze. I turn to Pete, cheeks blazing. “So, a power cut, you think?”

“Clearly.” He smiles at me and climbs down from his perch. Like he has a right to enjoy my embarrassment; he's the one who leapt onto a cabinet when the lights went out. I guess when you are used to being picked on daily, being discovered crouched and shivering on top of a cabinet — or a toilet — is nothing special.

He looks at the screens. “We're back on, but that's not what we were watching before. The recording has reset.”

We all peer, and see ourselves peering. We're in real time again.

“Get it back,” Smitty says to Pete. “We were just getting to the good part.”

“Aw, shall I get you some popcorn?” Alice is brushing herself down with a vengeance, ready to spit bile at anyone who crosses her.

“Do you think that was the weather?” I ask no one in particular. I really, really want it to have been the weather. Why else would the power suddenly go down? “Should we take a look around?”

“Sure.” Smitty's out the door before I can ask twice, and I'm glad that I can stop avoiding meeting his eyes. I think about his arms around me.
Shame Attack.
I think I actually grasped his butt with one of my hands.I stretch the offending hand out like I've touched acid, trying to shed the memory. I hope he doesn't think I did it on purpose. On one of the TV screens I watch him walk normally out the door and then crumple into a cringe, head in hands, as soon as he is out of sight. Except he's not. I think it takes him a second to realize that we can still see him — and he cringes again.
What?
I can't help thinking angrily,
Was it so very disgusting that I even touched you, Smitty?