Holiday of the Dead (62 page)

Mya was shivering. Her fear grew. She was in hell, now – really in enemy territory. If she put a foot wrong, the zombies would kill her. No questions asked. No mercy given.

Zimmer drove the truck slowly along the road. On each side were cages and enclosures once used to house animals. Now people were stored in the pens and paddocks.

Mya thought her heart would burst when she saw a group of children, aged around nine or ten, reaching through the bars of a cage. Their little faces were creased with horror and tears stained their cheeks. For a moment Mya couldn’t breathe, panic clutching at her chest. But as Zimmer drove by, and the children went past, she mastered her horror again. She had to keep herself together.

Zombies watched Mya and Zimmer as they drove. They had stopped to stare at the truck. They knew it contained food, their feast for the June feeding.

“Told you,” said Zimmer, “don’t look ’em in the eye – they’ll take it as a challenge and might just go for us.”

Hundreds of zombies were strolling along the paths that snaked around the resort. They moved in groups or individually. There didn’t seem to be much interaction between them. Some leaned over to look down at the humans in the enclosures. The undead snarled and growled at the terrified people.

Mya’s chest flared with rage.

She wanted to kill every zombie here. If she had a gun, she might just have leapt out of the cab and started firing, blowing the heads off those monsters.

But she wouldn’t last long. She was one against many. Zombies cared little about their kind. So what if some died? As long as they got to you, that was all that mattered.

During the war, waves of zombies charged the army. The undead were mown down in their hundreds. But behind the first wave more came. More and more and more. The dead sea was unstoppable. Military action failed. Humanity was defeated.

“Here we are,” said Zimmer.

He stopped the truck in front of some single-storey buildings. There was a swimming pool to the right. It contained no water, just bones and litter. Next to the pool a female zombie lounged on a sun-bed. She wore bikini bottoms. She had no need of the top because her breasts were gone. The whole front of her body was gone, and Mya could see into the cavity. The woman sat up and brushed her long, grey hair out of her face, and then curled back her lips and dribbled.

Mya followed Zimmer out of the cab. The heat was stifling. The smell of decay hung in the air. A rich, ripe odour that made Mya retch.

“Your companion feeling somewhat under the weather, Zimmer?” said a voice.

Mya turned towards it. Approaching them was a figure wearing a black fedora on his head, long black coat, black trousers, and black shoes. He wore sunglasses. His face was chalk-white. The skin on his hands was peeled to show bones and ligaments.

We’re his food, thought Mya. His instinct is to eat us, and he wants to eat us right now – but he’s evolved the ability to control his nature.

She looked him straight in the face. “I worked on the docks up in Leith. I was on a ground team, repairing trucks that ferried cargo to Scottish Z-Worlds.”

“And you came south?”

“My family was from this area. Before the …”

“I see,” said Geller. He looked her up and down. “You could have been on the breeding programme. You appear fit, healthy – genetically-blessed.”

“I know, I know,” said Geller. “It would damage the stock, let some fresh air in.” He licked his lips. Spit oozed from his mouth. “Humans are better when they’re ripe. A nice odour of decay on the meat. And it makes it softer. Too much exposure to fresh air spoils that a little. Always best to keep them in that humid condition provided so well by your trucks, eh? What do you say, Asher?”

“I say …” Mya’s mouth was dry. “I say, of course.”

“Of course,” said Geller. “Follow me. I’ll show you.”

Geller led them behind the buildings and towards an enclosure. Zombies were leaning over the wall, snarling at something down below. Mya’s skin goose fleshed. Her fear mounted.

“Here we are,” said Geller as they reached the wall.

Mya had to use all the military training she’d received at the Human First camps in the north of Scotland to stop herself from screaming.

Down in the enclosure, three men had been tied to trees. The men were naked and they were screaming. Their bodies were covered in wounds. Blood soaked the ground. Chunks of meat torn out of their bodies were strewn around.

Mya wanted to leap over the wall and go to the men, to one in particular – the one who had kissed her and laid a hand on her belly.

But she controlled her emotions. It was difficult. Inside she was wailing.

Geller lifted his hand. A door opened at the back of the enclosure.

A huge zombie burst out of the entrance. The giant was naked and had enormous muscles. Its flesh was grey and parts of its scalp were missing, showing the skull underneath.

It was a ’roid zombie. One of the monsters this new, evolved zombie society had pumped full of growth hormone for their own entertainment.

The ’roid zombies were used in gladiatorial-style games, where they were pitted against the best of humanity – former professional fighters, soldiers, hard men.

There was only ever one winner in those contests.

Humans were no longer the alpha species.

The monster charged at the men tied to the trees. They shrieked. The zombie tore a chunk from one man’s thigh. The victim howled in pain.

Mya stared in horror as the zombie grabbed the man in the centre – her man. The creature sank its teeth into her lover’s arm. He cried out and caught Mya’s eye. Seeing her intensified his terror, and she saw this. She wheeled away just as the zombie bit through her lover’s arm, and all she heard as she staggered away was his squeals of anguish.

She looked at him. He was sitting on his bunk. The cabin was bare apart from the two beds. A door on the back wall led to a toilet and washbasin. They would stay here till after the feeding, then, in the early hours of the morning, drive back to Dover.

“We’re trying to get along, trying to stay alive, and you … you lot just spoil everything – you put the rest of us in danger. You’re not Human First, you’re
Me
First,
Us
First. Sod the rest of humanity.”

Mya said, “You’ll end up as food, that’s what. And being you’re overweight, older, bad skin, you’ll be shipped to the inner cities. Tossed out in the streets with a bunch of other oldies where you’ll be hunted down by first-born zombies. The originals. The ones you can’t talk to, Zimmer. You can’t beg and reason with them, you know that. They’ll rip you apart. You’re food. That’s what we all are. Is that what you think you deserve?”

“I … I just want to live.”

“You won’t. You’ll die in agony like those men out there today. You’ll be eaten alive. No questions. You know that. It’s how we all go. It’s human destiny – to be devoured.”

“The cargo we were carrying, the cargo your friends stole, it’s ended up here anyway. Those people
are
going to get eaten. You failed.”

At midnight, the great feeding would begin. The human cargo would be released into the grounds of Z-World. Two hundred men, women, and children. Add to that the hundreds already caged at the old zoo, it would mean that nearly a thousand humans would be stampeding through the resort.

And then the zombies would hunt them. Nearly four hundred monsters unleashed.

The zombies would savage the humans. They would eat them. Kill them all. The screams of the dying would echo across London. Z-World would be swimming in blood and gore. Death would be everywhere. There would be no human survivors.

“Are you wearing your badge?” said Zimmer.

“Yes,” Mya said, indicating the red, cotton square pinned to her jacket. It marked a human worker out from food. The identification was vital if you were delivering to a Z-World. Any human wandering around without the marker would either be killed on the spot or thrown into an enclosure or cage for eating later.

Zimmer and Mya stayed in the shadows and made their way to the vehicle bays.

“I can’t believe you drugged me and swapped this trailer,” said Zimmer, standing near the container that stored his original cargo.