Zom-B Angels (13 page)

‘Only those of a certain size,’ Dr Oystein says. ‘We thrive primarily on human brains, but those of larger animals and fish are nourishing too. Fortunately a small band of
people managed to drive back the zombies on the day of the attack and barricade themselves in here. Ciara was one of them. They survived and hung on until we set up camp in County Hall. All except
Ciara chose to be relocated to compounds beyond the city once we gave them that option. She had grown fond of the place, and of my Angels, so she decided to stay.’

We move in silence from one tank to another, studying an array of fish, turtles, squid and all sorts of weird species. Many are beautifully coloured and strangely shaped, and I’m reminded
of how exotic this place seemed when I came here as a child. I never saw the appeal of aquariums before I visited. I thought they were dull places for nerds who loved goldfish.

We come to a glass tunnel through a huge tank of sharks. There are other things in there with them, but who takes notice of anything else when you spot a shark?

Dr Oystein draws to a halt in the middle of the tunnel and gazes around. ‘I did not know much about the maintenance of aquariums when I first moved in, but I have made it my business to
learn. Some of my Angels share my passion and tend to the tanks in my absence. Perhaps one of you will wish to help too.’

Rage shakes his head. ‘I only like fish when it’s in batter and served up with chips.’

‘Philistine,’ I sneer.

‘Up yours,’ he says. ‘They don’t do anything for me. I’d rather go on safari than deep-sea diving.’

‘I doubt if anyone will be going on safari any time in the near future,’ Dr Oystein murmurs. ‘And the zoos have been picked clean of their stock by now — I sent teams to
check, in case we could harvest more brains. But at least this small part of our natural heritage survives.’

Dr Oystein sits down and nods for us to join him on the floor. He says nothing for a moment, relishing the underwater world which we’ve become a temporary part of. Then he makes a happy
sighing sound.

‘For many decades I have found God in the creatures of the sea,’ he says. ‘The sheer diversity of life, the crazy shapes and colours, the way they can adapt and flourish . . .
I defy anyone to stroll through an aquarium and tell me our world could throw forth such wonders without the guiding hand of a higher power.’

‘You’re not a fan of Darwin then?’ Rage snickers.

‘Oh, I believe in evolution,’ Dr Oystein says. ‘But you do not have to exclude one at the expense of the other. All creatures – ourselves included – are servants of
nature and the changing forces of the world in which we live. But how can such a world have come into being by accident? If evolution was the only force at work, large, dull, powerful beasts would
have prevailed and stamped their mark on this planet long ago. Only a curious, playful God would have populated our shores and seas with such a glittering, spellbinding array of
specimens.’

Dr Oystein turns his gaze away from the sharks to look us in the eye, one after the other, as he speaks.

‘I did not bring you here by chance. As I said, I find God in places like this, and God is what I wish to discuss. I was not always a believer, so I will not be dismayed if you do not
share my beliefs. I am not looking to convert either of you, merely to explain how and why I came to put together my team of Angels.

‘I was born shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. It might seem odd, but I no longer recall the exact date. It is even possible that I was born in the late nineteenth century,
though I do not think I am quite that old.

‘For the first thirty-five or forty years of my life, I was an atheist. I hurled the works of Darwin and other scientists at those who clung to the ways of what I thought was a ridiculous,
outdated past. Then, in the 1930s, in the lead-up to the Second World War, God found me and I realised what a fool I had been.’ Dr Oystein lowers his gaze and sighs again, sadly this
time.

‘God found me,’ he repeats in a cracked voice, ‘but not before the Nazis found me first . . .’

Dr Oystein travelled around Europe with his parents when he was a child. As a man, he continued to tour the world, but ended up settling in Poland, where his wife was from and
where his elder brother – also a doctor – had set up home.

They were happy years, he tells us, the brothers working together, raising their families, enjoying the lull between the wars. Dr Oystein and his brother were noted geneticists who could have
lived anywhere – they had offers from across the globe – but they were happy in Poland.

Then the Nazis invaded. Dr Oystein’s instincts told him to flee, but his wife and children didn’t want to leave their home and his brother refused to go too. With an uneasy feeling,
he agreed to remain and hoped that he would be allowed to carry on his work in peace and quiet, since he had no strong political ties and wasn’t a member of any of the religions or races
which the Nazis despised.

Unfortunately for the doctor, the Nazis were almost as interested in genetics as they were in killing Jews and gypsies. They were intent on improving the human form and creating a master race.
They saw Dr Oystein and his brother as key allies in their quest to overcome the weaknesses of nature.

When Dr Oystein rejected their advances, he was imprisoned in a concentration camp along with his brother and their families. The camps weren’t as hellish as the death camps which were
built later in the war, but the chances of survival were slim all the same.

‘If the guards disliked you,’ Dr Oystein says quietly, ‘they worked you until you could work no more, then executed you for failing to complete your tasks. Or they tortured you
until you confessed to whatever crime they wished to charge you with. They might make you stand still for hours on end, under the threat of death if you moved, then shoot you when you collapsed
from sheer exhaustion.’

Dr Oystein had three children. His brother had four. The Nazis killed one of Dr Oystein’s children and two of his brother’s, and made it clear that their wives and the surviving
children would be executed as well if the brothers didn’t do as they were told. When they saw what they were up against, they agreed to be shipped off to a secret unit to work for their
monstrous new masters.

The Nazis yearned to unravel the secrets of life and death, to bring the dead back from beyond the grave. There were two reasons. One was to create an army of undead soldiers, to give them an
advantage in the war. The other was so that they could survive forever, to indefinitely enjoy the pleasures of the new society which they were hell-bent on creating.

Dr Oystein and his brother were part of an elite team, some of the greatest minds in the world, all working towards the same warped goal. Some were there by force, some by choice. It
didn’t matter. They all had to slave away as hard as they could. Nazis were not known for their tolerance of failure.

‘We made huge strides forward,’ Dr Oystein says without any hint of pride. ‘We unlocked secrets which are still beyond the knowledge of geneticists today. If we had been
allowed to share our findings with the world, we would have been hailed as wonders and people of your generation would be benefiting from our discoveries. But the Nazis were selfish. Records of our
advances were buried away in mounds of paperwork, far from prying eyes.’

Dr Oystein created the first revived. He brought a woman back to life after she had died of malnutrition in a concentration camp. (He says that most of their cadavers were drawn from the
camps.)

‘It should have been a wondrous moment,’ he whispers. ‘I had done what only God had previously achieved. Mankind’s potential skyrocketed. The future opened up to us as it
never had before. Immortality – or at least a vastly extended life – became ours for the taking.’

But instead he felt wretched, partly because he knew the Nazis would take his discovery and do terrible things with it, but also because he felt that he had broken the laws of the universe, and
he was sure that nothing good could come of that.

The Nazis rejoiced. The revived was a mindless, howling, savage beast, of no practical use to them, but they were confident that the doctor and his team would build on this breakthrough and find
a way to restore the mind as well as the body. But they couldn’t. No matter how many corpses they brought back to life, they couldn’t get the brains to work. Every zombie was a
drooling, senseless wreck.

‘The Nazis discussed dropping the living dead behind enemy lines,’ Dr Oystein says, ‘but as vicious as they were, they were not fools. They knew they could not manage the
spread of the reviveds once they released them, and they had no wish to inherit a world of deadly, infectious zombies.’

Dr Oystein was sure that they had pushed the project as far as they could. He didn’t share that view with the Nazis, but all of his results suggested to him that they had come to a dead
end. He didn’t think the brain of a corpse could ever be restored.

While all this was happening, the Nazis kept presenting the brothers with regular reports of their wives and children, photographs and letters to prove that they were alive and well. One day
that stopped. They were told that the information was being withheld until they created a revitalised specimen, but the doctors were afraid that something terrible had happened.

‘And we were right,’ Dr Oystein mutters. ‘I found out much later that both of my remaining children had died. My wife went wild and attacked those who had imprisoned her. My
brother’s wife tried to pull her away, to calm her down.

‘The women were shot by an over-eager guard. That left only my brother’s daughter and son. The girl died a couple of years later, but the boy survived.’ Dr Oystein coughs and
looks away. ‘I thought of my nephew often over the decades but never sought him out. I didn’t want him to see what I had become.’

With no news of their loved ones, and fearing the worst, the brothers made up their minds to escape. They hated working for the Nazis, and if their families had been executed, they had nothing
to lose — their own lives didn’t matter to them. They put a lot of time and thought into their plan, and almost pulled it off. But their laboratory was one of the most highly guarded
prisons in the world. Luck went against them on the night of their escape. They were caught and tortured.

Under interrogation, Dr Oystein told the Nazis that he thought it was impossible to revitalise a subject, that the vacant zombies in their holding cells were as good as it was ever going to get.
The Nazis were furious. They decided to teach the brothers a vicious lesson, to serve as an example. They infected the pair with the undead gene and turned them into zombies.

‘That should have been the end of us,’ Dr Oystein says, eyes distant as he remembers that dark, long-ago day. ‘But there was something nobody had counted on. Like every other
revived, I could not be brought back to consciousness by the hand of man. But there was another at work, a doctor of sorts, whose power was far greater than mine or anyone else’s.

‘Mock me if you wish – many others have before you, and for all I know they are right – but I am certain that my mind and soul were restored by a force of ultimate good, a
force I choose to call
God
.’

Dr Oystein pauses to study the sharks. I glance around at the others, disturbed by what I’ve been told. Burke returns my gaze calmly, giving no sign whether he buys this
or not. Rage is more direct. He puts a finger to the side of his head and twirls it around —
cuckoo!
But I can tell by the way he peeks guiltily at Dr Oystein as he lowers his arm
that the story has troubled him too.

‘God spoke to me when He saved me,’ Dr Oystein continues. ‘He told me what had happened, why I had been spared, what I must do.’

The reviveds were kept in holding pens, secure but not foolproof. Plenty of security measures were in place, but all had been designed with the limitations of brainless subjects in mind. The
Nazis hadn’t considered the threat of a conscious, intelligent zombie.

Dr Oystein freed the reviveds and set them on the soldiers and scientists, who were taken by surprise. Nobody was spared. The zombies ran riot, killing or converting everyone, helped by the
doctor, who opened doors and sought out hiding places.

When all of the humans had been disposed of, Dr Oystein destroyed every last scrap of paperwork and evidence of what had been going on. He knew that reports had been sent to officials elsewhere,
but he did what he could to limit the damage. After that, with a heavy heart, he killed all of the zombies one by one, ripping out their brains to ensure they were never brought back to life
again.

Dr Oystein doesn’t mention his brother, but I’m sure he must have killed him too. I’m not surprised that he doesn’t go into specifics. It’s not the sort of thing I
imagine you want to spend a lot of time thinking about.

His work finished, Dr Oystein slipped away into the night, to set about the mission which he had been given by the voice inside his head.