The Swiss Family RobinZOM (Book 5) (5 page)

“How?” Fritz said.

“I don’t know,” Ernest said. “But there must be a way.”

“I’m all ears,” Fritz said. “All I know is we just got our asses handed to us. What I don’t understand is I thought smashing their brains in would end them. If they can operate without brains they’ve got no weakness!”

“Destroying anything’s brain is meant to kill it!” Ernest said.

“Then why hasn’t it this time?” Fritz said.

“All viruses are known to require a living host to propagate,” Bill said. He was deep in thought, thinking out loud. “But this virus has never needed a living host. In fact, the moment it infects someone, it kills them so it can take control of all their bodily functions. There is nothing usual about this virus, except perhaps the way it spreads. It needs new hosts all the time. No new hosts, and it ceases to grow.”

The Robinson boys held the severed body parts up like a ghastly baby’s mobile. One of the pieces, the upper right arm, had a tattoo. It was a black circle, a snake consuming its own tail.

“Pretty groovy design,” Fritz said.

“It’s an Egyptian symbol of everlasting life,” Bill said.

“Looks like whoever owned the tattoo got exactly what he wanted,” Ernest said. “If not quite the way he expected.”

“What do we do with these pieces?” Fritz said.

“There’s only one thing we can do with them,” Bill said.

Flap, flap.

Flap, flap, flap.

Flap, flap.

“It’s coming back,” Fritz said.

“I don’t think it’s just one,” Bill said.

The foliage burst open, and a dozen of the disgusting creatures flew out of it, spinning and grasping, kicking and punching at any and all contenders, living or alive.

The Robinsons ran.

The skin cracked and popped, and the smoke smelled like fried bacon a month past its use-by date. The limbs, still jerking and jiving, crawled out of the fire in different directions, leaving a zigzag trail of fire in their wake.

Bill collected them and tossed them back onto the fire. He watched, unblinking, as the pieces of undead flesh finally stopped moving under their own volition and only jerked under the popping of burning wood.

The night air was chilly. Bill hugged his jumper around himself and poked at the blackened shards of bone that remained in the fire.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Liz said.

Bill looked up and was surprised to find it was dark.

“Where are the boys?” he said.

“They’re asleep,” Liz said.

“How long have I been staring at the fire?” Bill said.

“About three hours,” Liz said. “Something on your mind?”

“It’s nothing,” Bill said.

Liz gave Bill a look as if she didn’t believe him.

“It’s these creatures,” Bill said. “We had one of them. We beat it, hammered it, hacked it up into pieces until we were exhausted, and it still ran away. Nothing should still be alive after a beating like that. But it’s out there somewhere causing havoc. There’s no way to beat them.”

“Of course there’s a way to beat them,” Liz said. “We just haven’t thought of it yet.”

“Short of setting fire to the entire island, there’s nothing we can do,” Bill said. “They’re unstoppable.”

“Nothing is unstoppable,” Liz said.

“These things are,” Bill said. “There’s no way around that. Maybe if we had a pit of acid we could drop them all in…”

Bill shook his head.

“It’s no good,” he said. “They’ve evolved beyond anything we’ve seen up to now. I’m sick of nature being against us. When is it going to work in our favour?”

“Does anything ever really work in our favour?” Liz said. “That’s how life makes itself interesting, by making it unpredictable.”

She leaned her head against Bill’s shoulder.

“I think I’d prefer a boring life,” Bill said.

“We’ll come up with something,” Liz said. “You’ll see. Come on. Let’s go to bed and think this through in the morning.”

Bill’s legs felt stiff. He walked bent and hunched over. He leaned back, stretching the muscles in his back. He turned to follow Liz, and stopped. He turned back to the ashes. Something was snagged on an upturned log. It was a singed square flap of skin. It had a tattoo on it – the snake swallowing its tail. Bill picked it up and held it in his hand. It was still warm.

There was something about it, something that held his attention, something he remembered… He turned it around at ninety-degree intervals, and then stopped. His eyes grew wide and he dropped the square of skin.

“Oh my God,” he said, face turning pale. “That’s impossible.”

“What?” Liz said. “What is it?”

“This is the tattoo from the creature we caught today,” Bill said.

“Yeah, so?” Liz said.

“I thought I recognised it when we were hitting it,” Bill said. “Now I know where I saw it before.”

“Wait,” Liz said. “You’ve seen this before?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “I have. I know who the creature was. He was the noisy man in the bar from The Long Journey, at the next table to us. I remember looking at him, annoyed because it was hard to hear the radio. He turned back to his friend and I saw this on the back of his arm.”

Bill picked up the skin and extended it to Liz, who scrunched up her face and didn’t take it.

“So?” Liz said. “What difference does it make who he was?”

“It makes a difference because he was a zombie, and we killed him,” Bill said.

“What do you mean?” Liz said. “When did we kill him?”

“Soon after we first arrived on the island,” Bill said. “He’s buried in our graveyard!”

The graves stood open like sardine cans, the dirt forced out, lying in ordered mounds. Scruffy trails ran from the inside of each one, the scuff marks of clawed hands and dragging feet.

“This is great,” Fritz said. “We kill them, bury them, and then they come back stronger and worse than they were before!”

He threw up his hands.

“That’s just great!” he said. “All this time we thought we were wiping them out, when actually we were incubating them to become even more dangerous! Now we have an island full of mindless killing machines running rampant. A single scratch from which could well infect us with the virus!”

“We can’t call them zombies,” Ernest said.

“Why not?” Fritz said. “I don’t think they’ll mind.”

“But they’re not zombies,” Ernest said. “They’re spinning demons. They’re different entities. We need to deal with them differently.”

“Let’s call them Spinners then,” Liz said. “Everyone in agreement?”

They all nodded.

“I’m not sure if this is the most pressing issue right now,” Fritz said.

“I’m just glad we didn’t bury every zombie we found,” Ernest said.

“What do you mean?” Fritz said.

“We burned a lot of them when the horde came, don’t you remember?” Ernest said.

“Oh, yeah!” Fritz said. “Small mercies.”

“How many of them do you think there are?” Liz said to Bill.

“Judging by the number of re-opened graves, I’d say we have about three to four hundred on our hands,” Bill said.

“Wonderful,” Fritz said. “Just when I thought it was safe to go for an afternoon stroll again. How many times do we have to kill these things?”

“Technically they’re already dead,” Ernest said. “But death doesn’t mean what it used to.”

“Thanks for that, Dr Freud,” Fritz said.

Bill frowned.

“I said before that the virus constantly needs new hosts to continue to spread,” he said. “But what I don’t understand is what reanimated these zombies in the first place.”

“These bodies haven’t had anything to eat in ages,” Ernest said. “They were dead. Really dead.”

“That wouldn’t matter if there was another source of energy,” Bill said.

“What source of energy?” Ernest said. “There’s nothing here! Unless you’re talking about worms or maggots?”

“No,” Bill said. “It would need to be something more substantial than that. They’ve always been infected. But why did they rise again now? What’s so different than before?”

They were silent a long moment. Ernest cast a look over the heaped mounds of earth. In places they were a deep rich red-brown colour, in others, black. He crouched down and ran his fingers over the soil. His eyes lit up and he turned to Bill.

“Lightning!” he said. “It was lightning!”

Fritz looked up at the blue sky.

“There’s no lightning,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

“Not now,” Ernest said. “The other night when we had the storm.”

“Is anyone else lost in this conversation?” Fritz said.

“I am,” Jack said.

“There would need to be evidence this place was struck,” Bill said to Ernest.

“There is,” Ernest said, holding the soil up and letting it run between his fingers.

Bill’s eyes widened. He turned and ran toward a pine tree. He scaled halfway up it and peered down at the graveyard around them.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re right!”

He jumped down from the tree. Liz grabbed him.

“I enjoy watching you lose your mind as much as the next person,” she said. “But what are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry,” Bill said. “Ernest’s hypothesis is, what if these inert creatures were reanimated?”

“Reanimated how?” Fritz said.

“What we know about this virus is it doesn’t need living hosts,” Bill said. “It only requires an energy source. So long as the host can spread the virus, it doesn’t care where that energy comes from. I said these Spinners evolved. I was wrong. They were
created
from zombies.”

“Created?” Fritz said. “By who?”

“Not by whom, by what,” Bill said, looking up at the sky. “Have any of you ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?”

“No,” Fritz said. “Is it by Stephen King?”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Ernest said, shaking his head.

“A bolt of lightning powered a dead body into becoming reanimated,” Bill said. “It came to life. The other day we had a huge thunder storm. There was lots of lightning. Do you remember? There would have been plenty of power. It could have struck here, giving the zombies all the power they needed.”

“But that’s a work of fiction!” Fritz said. “How can it happen in real life?”

“There are many things we don’t know about real life, least of all the virus,” Bill said. “We don’t know what happens when certain forces come in contact with it.”

“But they’re dead!” Fritz said. “How can they come back?”

“You mean, how can they come back
again
?” Bill said. “They already came back once, remember. There’s no telling how many times they can come back should the right catalyst occur.”

“You mentioned they were struck by lightning,” Liz said. “Wouldn’t there be evidence of that if it were true?”

“There is evidence,” Bill said. “You just can’t see it very well from the ground. Get to a higher vantage point and you’ll see this area is dotted with lots of black circles, the places where lightning struck.”

“But why would lightning strike here?” Ernest said. “It’s not the highest point on the island. There’s nothing here to attract it.”

“You don’t know that,” Bill said. “There might be an ore deposit underneath us. It would draw lightning to it. Just our luck to have set up a cemetery over an ore mine! The power could have sent a pulse through the bodies, and the virus was ready for it. What we’re seeing in these things is the virus in its purest form bypassing human consciousness. A creature that exists only to propagate more of itself. If a single scratch can do that, being an unstoppable whirlwind of destruction is the best method.”

“You sound like you admire them,” Fritz said.

“I admire nature’s inexhaustible creativity,” Bill said. “And how can you not admire its survival instinct? It will not die until we toss it on the fire. It will not stop fighting until the host cannot fight anymore.”

“Is it just me,” Fritz said, “or does it feel like this island doesn’t really want us here? It keeps throwing new things at us.”

“The island doesn’t have a will,” Bill said. “It’s just the way things are in the world now.”

“Then how do we kill these Spinners?” Fritz said. “If destroying their brains doesn’t stop them, what can we do?”

“For all intents and purposes the virus does kill them,” Ernest said. “But when they come in contact with an electric current they get reinvigorated with life. There’s little we can do save burn.”

“We can’t set the whole island on fire,” Fritz said.

“We could build a barrier between us,” Liz said. “Blocking them off from our side of the island.”

“There are two problems with that idea,” Bill said. “One, there’s no guarantee a barrier would be able to stop them indefinitely, and two, there are things we need on the other side of the island. What if one of us gets ill again and we need medicine? It’s all in the middle of the island.”

“Then what do we do?” Fritz said.

There was another pause of reflection.

“We smash them into pulp,” Bill said.

“We tried that,” Fritz said. “It didn’t work.”

“Not with cudgels,” Bill said. “Another method.”

“And how are we going to do that, exactly?” Fritz said. “They’re as different from zombies as zombies are from us. They’re unstoppable.”

“Nothing’s unstoppable,” Bill said. “You just have to figure out its weakness.”

“But these things have no weakness,” Ernest said. “No self-control, nothing. They just go mad.”

“Then that
is
their weakness,” Bill said. “They’re blind to their actions, to where they’re heading.”

“So?” Fritz said.

“So, we’ll give them a little prod in the right direction,” Bill said.

“Which direction is that?” Liz said.