Zom-B Mission by Darren Shan Page B

well, that was before I saw him in all his glory.I’m not standing up for him now, am I?’
    Vinyl frowns. ‘You really ran back into the school instead of leaving with him and going your own way later?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘That was dumb, wasn’t it?’
    I laugh and stretch out my right hand to knock knuckles. Then I remember that I’m a zombie who can’t touch him, and settle for a cheesy thumbs up.

TWELVE
    I tell Vinyl about my life since I was killed. The bit he enjoys most is when I describe climbing the London Eye.
    ‘You really scaled it using just your hands?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Wicked.’
    When I’m done, it’s Vinyl’s turn. He was at his new school the day of the attacks. By luck he was outside for a phys-ed class when the world went haywire. He fled with some of his classmates,then headed home. He couldn’t find his mum and dad.
    ‘So maybe they’re alive, in another compound,’ I suggest.
    ‘Nah,’ he says sadly. ‘I met a neighbour of ours a few months later. He saw them get killed. He said both were properly slaughtered, their brains ripped out, so at least I don’t have to worry about them stumbling around in a monstrous state.’
    Vinyl survived that first nightby locking himself into a bank vault.
    ‘You what?’ I hoot.
    ‘I figured a bank would be as safe a place as any,’ he grins. ‘The vaults are operated by time locks. As long as we could keep out the zombies until the vaults were due to shut, we could slip inside and they wouldn’t be able to get at us.’
    ‘You were always oozing with brains,’ I mutter.
    ‘Yeah, baby,’ he crows. ‘I’d bea prize scalp for one of your crowd.’
    Vinyl found refuge in one of our local banks, spent that first night locked up nice and tight – he says he slept on a bed of banknotes that must have been worth a million pounds, but I think he’s making that bit up – then struck out for the countryside in the morning.
    ‘Most of the people in the bank stayed behind,’ he snorts. ‘They thought the armywould rescue them. I figured there wasn’t a hope of that. When a city like London falls, there’s no quick recovery.’
    Vinyl roughed it for a few weeks in the country, avoiding contact with anyone. Then he stumbled across one of the first compounds to be set up and threw in his lot with them.
    ‘It fell less than a week later,’ he sighs. ‘We underestimated the sheer bloody determinationof the undead. They kept coming and coming. They wore us down, picked holes in our barriers, and next thing we knew they were swarming the place.’
    He made it out with a few others and went looking for another compound. He found New Kirkham – though it didn’t have a name then – and he’s been there ever since, only leaving it at times like this, to guide other humans to sanctuary.
    ‘Igot closely involved in the running of the place,’ he says. ‘Age doesn’t matter any more. Qualifications are irrelevant. It all boils down to what you know and how you operate under pressure. I’d learnt a lot of lessons from the collapse of the first compound and I was able to make suggestions to shore up our defences.’
    ‘So you’re a Big Chief now?’ I grin. ‘Power, a throne, a harem?’
    ‘Yeah,’ he deadpans. ‘A gold-rimmed toilet, caviar for breakfast, the works.’
    The army rolled by a month or so after Vinyl had arrived in New Kirkham. They wanted to put their stamp on the place, but the residents were happy with things the way they were. They rejected the offer of help and have remained one of the few truly independent mainland compounds.
    ‘Were the soldiers pissed?’I ask.
    He shrugs. ‘They thought we were fools, but they left us in peace. Told us not to come crying to them when it all broke down. But so far it hasn’t.’
    One day, out of the blue, Billy Burke came calling. He was with a group of survivors. He’d led them out of London with the help of a few Angels. The newcomers were accepted gratefully—there’s plenty