CHAPTER FIVE

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

-Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Liza arrived panting and sweating into a field that was now no longer 60% zombie. There were maybe fifty of them left, milling around and working their slack jaws, eyes darting around. They hadn’t seen her yet, and she knew that whipping out her pistol from its holster would be exactly the kind of movement that would draw some attention, especially as a couple of the zombies dotted around were lurching as close as twenty feet away from her.

Instinctively she wanted to keep still and quiet, but there was very little point since the helicopter was drawing their attention more than anything else. All of them were gaping up at it, a couple lifting long fingers to swipe the air in its direction. Liza figured that depth perception was just one of those things you lost in death…

The helicopter alighted, and McCray strolled across the grass — still ignored by the undead, who were limping up to the whooshing helicopter — and Liza took her chances, knowing the pistol in its holster still had something like 8 bullets in the chamber. The zombies were paying more attention to the chopper than to her.

“Wait!” she yelled, darting a wide berth around each zombie as she cleared the field to reach the man in his shining silver outfit. “Wait, Malcolm, please!”

He turned, to her surprise, and raised his eyebrows at her like this was any other day. “Yes?” he said, and she almost couldn’t hear him over the blades slicing the air beside them, throwing her hair into her face.

“I just want to know … why?” she called, her voice so hoarse that she wondered when she had been screaming. She didn’t remember it.

“I thought I explained it?” he said, louder this time, helping Rayna up to the steps in her ridiculous shoes. “Didn’t I?”

“Explained what?” Liza yelled with desperation. The zombies were all lurching closer and closer, and she was aware of them most of all because of the instinctive tingling on the back of her neck that told her to run again. She was definitely going to sleep well tonight, after all this exercise. That was for sure.

“I did this to help you!” he yelled back, pointing his finger right at her. She resisted the urge to spin around and look behind her.

“Me?”

“Humanity,” he elaborated. “I have travelled from place to place and I want to stay somewhere for longer this time. I don’t know where else is left to go! Humanity is the last intelligent life of this cycle.”

“What?” Liza screamed, lifting her hands to her hair. “Please, I just want to know … what was this? What happened? What is going to happen next?”

He quirked the corner of his mouth upwards in an awkward facsimile of a smile. “Listen, Liza,” he said. She struggled to remember when she had introduced herself. “I promise you. Your world was a year, two years max, away from total destruction. Self-destruction.”

“So you thought you’d do it first?” she cried, her eyes welling up. “Is that it? You wanted to take back control?”

Malcolm let the smile fall away and shook his head sadly. “I did this for you. You need something to fight that isn’t each other. Now that you’re at the top of the food chain, you have nobody to destroy but each other. I saw it with the Galthrim, the Varargos, the Xthinikirigim, the Essecheran—”

“Stop it, stop, I can’t hear you,” Liza yelled. “I don’t … I still don’t understand. Why just us? Why here? Because we won that competition?”

McCray looked up at the helicopter and then back down at her, and let out a small sigh. “You didn’t win a competition,” he said. “I don’t even remember what logline you entered. I’m sure it was awful. I’m here because you’re my demographic, and I could determine that I would get several thousand of you to demo the headsets. But I’m not just here, I am in other places, in other universities, colleges, schools, all over the world.”

Liza shook her head, unable to wrap her mind around what he was saying.

Was any of this real? Was it true?

“As for what happens next, that’s up to humanity. But your will to survive is just as strong as any other creature’s. Stronger, perhaps. You have to fight. The world as you know it will end. The wheels are already turning. I’m sorry for that. But you will defeat the threat after many decades of fighting, and you will rebuild society. I have given you a gift, Liza, though you will never ever be able to appreciate that — and I understand. I have given you the gift of a chance. Your species will take more than a hundred years to get back to the point you are at now, and at that point we will think of something new to set you back again. I am here now. I am here, on Earth, and I will never let anything bad happen to you.”

He was crying. She was struck dumb by the sight.

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“You’re not from here, are you?” she said, but her voice had dropped too low for him to hear her.

“I made it zombies because I knew that you would know exactly what to do in this situation — everyone has a zombie apocalypse plan.” She looked at his face, puffy, defeated, and wondered what she was seeing. “Fight,” he said. “I want you to win. I would go so far as to say that I need you to win. To ensure that you have a true headstart, I gave you those headsets. With them on, your kills will earn you upgrade points. Those upgrade points will allow you to get better gear. I want you to win, like I say, but it can’t be easy. Appreciate life, Liza. Appreciate all you have, and appreciate those around you.

“Everything changes right as we speak. Stores have handed off headsets in the thousands. People will stick them straight to their heads without second thought, and they’ll become a monster. Tomorrow we will wake up to a dangerous new world. There’s no more life as you know it. No more smartphones, no more internet … soon the people ensuring all the servers are up and running will all be gone. Everything holding you back from being the true concentrated essence of an apex predator is gone.” He clenched his fist and then splayed his fingers to indicate some kind of ‘poof’. Liza was trembling as she listened to the madman’s ramblings. “Where is your headset, by the way?”

“I threw it,” she said thickly.

“No, you’ll need it. It’s the one thing that will separate you from them.” He pointed all around at the zombies. “Everyone who is not a part of the solution will become part of the problem. That’s the way the zombie apocalypse works. It’s an apt analogy, honestly, for the way the world was going anyway.” A pause. “To hell in a handbasket!”

“You’re crazy,” she told him.

“By your standards, yes, I am. But by mine, you are.” He pointed to the far end of the field. Liza didn’t need to look to know that Spitfire’s blood was still splashed across the grass. “Get the boy’s headset. Zombies won’t eat them. If you don’t crush them, there will be plenty for everyone. Use it and become more powerful. Kill them. Win.” He smiled, and this time he looked more confident. “I’m counting on you. When I return, the Earth will be safe once again.”

“But how did you do it?” she demanded to know. “How?”

“There are things that you will never know. That intelligent civilisations have never before advanced quite enough to find out about. Let’s change that.”

Liza had plenty more things she wanted to say, but McCray was done talking. He ascended to the door, and then looked conflicted even from behind. He turned on his heel, holding tight onto the handle, and flipped a gun from his waistband that she had not seen even a glimpse of up until then.

He pointed it right at her head, and fired, and she screamed and bent double. But … felt nothing. When she straightened up again, she turned around to see dark congealed blood welling up from a hole right in the centre of a zombie’s forehead. If McCray had felt like it, it would have grabbed her; it had clearly been within a split second of her throat.

She turned around to speak, but he was gone and the helicopter rose from the grass. Liza made a pact to never turn her back on a zombie again … no matter how many questions she might have had.

The noise had once again drawn the attention of every roaming creature in the vicinity, and plenty of them were within thirty feet of her already, so Liza took a second to pull in a breath, orientated herself, and made her way to Spitfire’s pool of blood.

She gagged, and then righted herself and reached down to pick up the headset that the zombies had indeed left. And then she saw something else.

It was still attached to Spitfire’s goddamn ear.

That was it — she had a strong stomach, but that had to be it. She leaned against a tree and in a flurry of panic, disgust and fear, she lost everything she had eaten all day. Which wasn’t much.

The thick sound of phlegm rattling in something’s throat caused her to whip around to see that a creature was too close for comfort already — she kept underestimating the speed of their walk! — and she sucked in a couple of deep breaths and yanked the knife from her waist, opposite to her pistol, and strode forward.

Her stomach was still in turmoil, but if she gave off a couple of shots the zombies who had lost sight of her while she threw up in the trees would start to slope towards her again, and she would have to get used to disgusting stuff sooner rather than later.

So Liza hesitated for only a second before she drew back her arm and then … thok … jammed the six-inch blade into the temple of the approaching monster. It jerked for a second, and then its knees buckled so fast that she almost lost her balance and toppled down after it.

With a good yank, she retrieved her blackened blade and wiped it on the grass, pausing every other second to allow herself a dry heave.

The others who had spotted her running, maybe twenty of them at varying distances, were coming for her, so with tears in her eyes Liza kicked at the ear, and it didn’t come apart.

So she picked up the headset, and pulled it from the ear herself.

Standing with a tiny football-shaped hunk of plastic and metal in one hand, and a human ear in another, with tears in her eyes and the taste of acid in her mouth, Liza wondered what the hell there was to do next. Barricade herself somewhere? Hide? Fight?

She wanted to find her friends, that was certain. A tremble rippled through her as she thought about where they were, and she backed away from the approaching cluster of four zombies, and nearly stepped on something.

There were at least four headsets on the grass here, where people had ripped them off and then started to run.

She looked again at the ear in her hand and let out an audible yelp of horror — she hadn’t had to touch this freaking thing at all!

“OK, alright, here … what’s this?” she said, as if talking to a dog, and flapped the ear through the air. “Go get it!” She threw it with all her might behind the group of zombies — ears were a touch more aerodynamic than she probably would have guessed — and their nostrils flared and they turned to follow after the exposed bloody flesh scent.

“Thanks, Spitfire,” Liza muttered, and attached one of the clean sets to her own intact ear, before orientating herself and beginning to jog.

If she could get to the high street, maybe she could warn people who were buying and putting on the headsets right at that moment. Maybe she could save lives. And not only the lives of the people who would pop on the AR in the streets — McCray was truly a genius, she realised; he had made a game that people wanted to play in highly populated areas — but also the people who would become their victims.

She had no energy left to run. No food in her body, lightheaded from disgust and adrenaline, and thirsty as all hell, Liza half walked and half jogged back to the road to make her way, somehow, the four miles to the nearest town.