smiled back. And her smile widened.
I was in grave danger of dying, and she had died already tonight, and for some reason we were grinning like idiots.
‘Come on,’ she said, flicking her hair out of her eyes. ‘I’d give you a hand up, but... you know.’
‘I know,’ I said, and had a flash of real sadness that this woman, who was smiling with me now, was already dead, and that all I could do for her was make her more dead .
I stood up, and Melissa led the way. I resisted the temptation to look over the edge of the roof at the zombies below, but I could hear them down there.
At the other end of the roof a wide wooden plank had been semi-hidden by gravel. Melissa had me unearth it and lay it across the gap between the flat roof and a window ledge on a taller building nearby. An uncomfortable shuffle across the ledge led to a fire escape, and I gratefully climbed over the rails onto something that was designed to be stepped on.
I walked up a few flights then stopped at the fifth floor, holding on to the handrail and looking out across the complex. From up there I could see dozens of zombies milling around. They didn’t seem interested in other zombies, bumping off each other and changing direction as they did so, like a demonstration of particles interacting.
‘There are a lot of them down there,’ I said to Melissa, who was standing behind me. I could feel her impatience. We had had our moment, but it was past now.
‘How many people worked here?’ I asked.
‘A lot. But most of those zombies aren’t staff, they’re test subjects.’
‘Test subjects?’
‘Yes, test subjects. You don’t think they just happened to create some zombie-making potion by accident and also accidentally let it loose? The outbreak is an accident, but they’ve been working on these zombies for years.’
Mike had said it too, hadn’t he? Asked who would make zombies. I’d skipped over the question because I didn’t know, and I suppose on some level as a person who saw ghosts all the time I’d just written off the zombies as another form of undeath I had to deal with, and not questioned how they came into being.
Of course they weren’t a natural phenomenon. If zombies were naturally occurring, even rare, there would be incidents reported. Unlike ghosts, you didn’t have to have the sight—or whatever it was I had—to see them. They were pretty hard to miss.
The thought that this wasn’t entirely an accident, but that the company had been trying to make these things, and had been experimenting on... on what? On corpses? Or on living people?
I asked Melissa.
‘You don’t want to know,’ she said, and continued to walk up the fire escape.
The living, then. Fuck.
For an accountant, Melissa certainly knew a lot of what had been going on. And, judging by the route we were taking across the site, she was either a closet parkour fanatic or had set up and mapped out her own security-evading routes.
I didn’t know whether to be comforted or alarmed by the fact that Melissa, the person I was depending on to get me through this alive, was obviously more qualified to be dealing with a situation like this than either I first thought or she had admitted.
I ’LL SKIM OVER most of our on-high traversal of the lab complex site, as not only was it uneventful but any account of, say, my crossing of a sky-bridge via the copper, curved roof would involve far too many usages of undignified phrases like ‘eyes closed’ and ‘trying not to cry’.
So let’s skip to the part where we were descending a glass-enclosed stairwell in a building not far from the main entrance gates. The building we were aiming for was apparently at the centre of the site, a short dash from the fire door at the bottom of the stairwell, but there were a lot of zombies between us and our destination.
‘Let me scout ahead,’ Melissa said as we reached the bottom. While she had cautioned against entering the buildings themselves, the zombies
I was in grave danger of dying, and she had died already tonight, and for some reason we were grinning like idiots.
‘Come on,’ she said, flicking her hair out of her eyes. ‘I’d give you a hand up, but... you know.’
‘I know,’ I said, and had a flash of real sadness that this woman, who was smiling with me now, was already dead, and that all I could do for her was make her more dead .
I stood up, and Melissa led the way. I resisted the temptation to look over the edge of the roof at the zombies below, but I could hear them down there.
At the other end of the roof a wide wooden plank had been semi-hidden by gravel. Melissa had me unearth it and lay it across the gap between the flat roof and a window ledge on a taller building nearby. An uncomfortable shuffle across the ledge led to a fire escape, and I gratefully climbed over the rails onto something that was designed to be stepped on.
I walked up a few flights then stopped at the fifth floor, holding on to the handrail and looking out across the complex. From up there I could see dozens of zombies milling around. They didn’t seem interested in other zombies, bumping off each other and changing direction as they did so, like a demonstration of particles interacting.
‘There are a lot of them down there,’ I said to Melissa, who was standing behind me. I could feel her impatience. We had had our moment, but it was past now.
‘How many people worked here?’ I asked.
‘A lot. But most of those zombies aren’t staff, they’re test subjects.’
‘Test subjects?’
‘Yes, test subjects. You don’t think they just happened to create some zombie-making potion by accident and also accidentally let it loose? The outbreak is an accident, but they’ve been working on these zombies for years.’
Mike had said it too, hadn’t he? Asked who would make zombies. I’d skipped over the question because I didn’t know, and I suppose on some level as a person who saw ghosts all the time I’d just written off the zombies as another form of undeath I had to deal with, and not questioned how they came into being.
Of course they weren’t a natural phenomenon. If zombies were naturally occurring, even rare, there would be incidents reported. Unlike ghosts, you didn’t have to have the sight—or whatever it was I had—to see them. They were pretty hard to miss.
The thought that this wasn’t entirely an accident, but that the company had been trying to make these things, and had been experimenting on... on what? On corpses? Or on living people?
I asked Melissa.
‘You don’t want to know,’ she said, and continued to walk up the fire escape.
The living, then. Fuck.
For an accountant, Melissa certainly knew a lot of what had been going on. And, judging by the route we were taking across the site, she was either a closet parkour fanatic or had set up and mapped out her own security-evading routes.
I didn’t know whether to be comforted or alarmed by the fact that Melissa, the person I was depending on to get me through this alive, was obviously more qualified to be dealing with a situation like this than either I first thought or she had admitted.
I ’LL SKIM OVER most of our on-high traversal of the lab complex site, as not only was it uneventful but any account of, say, my crossing of a sky-bridge via the copper, curved roof would involve far too many usages of undignified phrases like ‘eyes closed’ and ‘trying not to cry’.
So let’s skip to the part where we were descending a glass-enclosed stairwell in a building not far from the main entrance gates. The building we were aiming for was apparently at the centre of the site, a short dash from the fire door at the bottom of the stairwell, but there were a lot of zombies between us and our destination.
‘Let me scout ahead,’ Melissa said as we reached the bottom. While she had cautioned against entering the buildings themselves, the zombies
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