The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(146)

“Miss?” he asked her. “Are you all right, Miss?”

She didn’t know how to even begin to answer. She looked up into the policeman’s face and for a moment was unable to tell whether he was alive or dead, or even remember whether she herself was alive or dead. Someone thrust a cup of water into her hands and draped a blanket over her shoulders. Someone else attempted to wipe the blood from her face.

As she sat there limp, hearing the sound of sirens and smelling the scent of death, voices reached her through her fog of shock. The police were saying that this tableaux hadn’t just happened on this one street. It was playing itself out all over London. All over the world.

The dead were coming back to life.

And they didn’t seem to like us.

She let herself be helped back to her feet, and then she let herself be tugged along, as she had allowed for most of her life, but when she realized that the destination she was being shepherded to was the back of an ambulance, she broke free from those who thought they were helping her. She ran as swiftly as she could, ran away, into the cafe, out a back entrance, and down an alleyway. This was no time to live meekly, to be swept along by the tide.

If the dead were coming back to life, her place wasn’t in a hospital, with the living and those who hoped to rejoin the living. It was in the morgue, with the dead.

Her dead.





Paula stared down the barrel of a gun held in the shaking hands of a guard standing in the doorway to the London morgue, and was surprised to realize that all she felt was a calm disinterest.

She felt no alarm. She only thought…how ironic.

Hours before, she would have acted as provocatively as possible in the hopes of setting off the trigger finger of the jittery young man in a uniform at least one size too large for him. She would have made a lunge in his direction, walked with the staggered gait of the living corpses she had seen wandering the streets of London as she’d zigzagged her way to the building in which she’d identified her father’s body…anything to provoke that bullet. But now everything had changed, for suddenly she had hope, and so she put her hands out slowly beside her, palms up, and then chose her words carefully.

“I’m not dead,” she said, hoping that her calm words would distract from the bits of brain matter that had spotted the front of her blouse when that first corpse had been shot, and from the blood stain that remained on her face, impervious to washing. The guard lowered his gun slightly, but it did not appear to Paula that he had loosened his grip.

“Why did you come here?” he asked. One of his shirt sleeves was missing, and the other was dripping with blood. “This is the last place you should want to be.”

“My father’s here. Do you remember me? I remember you. You were standing by the elevators when I came in, I think. He died last week and I had to come here yesterday to identify him. What happened to your arm?”

He shook his head, unready to talk about it. He looked like the sort of person who might never be ready to talk about it, holding things in for a lifetime, as she had.

“I’m lucky to be alive,” he said. “You should leave.”

“I need to be here,” she said, taking a careful step forward. “I need to see him. Please.”

“No one needs to be here,” he said, standing aside and letting her pass through the door to stand beside him in the entrance hall. “And I’ve been here long enough. They’ve been coming to life all day. I hope never to see this place again.”

Then he was where she had been, outside looking in.

“You’re not going to find what you’re looking for,” he said. “But you’re welcome to try. The place is all yours.”

He tossed her the keys.

“Just remember—some doors you’re not going to want to unlock.”

And then he was gone, leaving her alone in a lobby that looked even less welcoming than it had been the day before. The floor was slick with blood and littered with body parts. As she picked her way through the building, that no longer fazed her, because that’s what the city had looked like as she’d made her way here. Only luck had let her get this far. She retraced her steps to the room in which she had been asked to identify her father…but it was empty. She feared that she was too late, that her father, animated by the plague that had infected the planet, had already gotten up and staggered away. It could have been his blood on the guard’s sleeves. It could have been his body parts on the floor, shredded as the guard had defended himself. But as she looked around the bland room, she realized that no single body ever stayed there for long. This was just a place where people like her came face to face with death. The bodies were shuttled here from somewhere else.

Paula returned to the hallway to find that somewhere else. The floor had become so slippery that she had to steady herself against a wall to stand upright. She’d watched enough television to know what she was looking for, but it wasn’t her eyes that first found her goal, that by-now clichéd room with columns and rows of refrigerated cubicles.

It was her ears. She heard her destination before she saw it.

With her hand on the doorknob and the sounds of violence raging inside, she was afraid for the first time that day. The thought that her father was inside, and that she might be stopped from reaching him, stirred up that fear. But she was more afraid of what she would learn about her father than of what would happen to her, and so forced herself into the room.