The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(148)

Around her, some people seemed to be going about their business, but many had abandoned their routines, fleeing the city in search of sanctuary in the countryside. London had become depopulated. It was as if a great city had become a small village in a matter of days. There was no longer a problem getting a seat on the tube, though people now looked at each other with suspicion for new reasons that were just as deadly as the old.

One day after walking, she aimlessly rode the tube for hours, letting it take her where it would. It seemed as useful as anything else she could have been doing. She no longer had anywhere to go. She no longer had anywhere to be. And besides, this is how she felt closest to her family. Riding the public transportation of the city, she felt closer to her father than when she slept next to him at night, propped up in a chair waiting for a metamorphosis she now doubted would ever come. This was the sort of place in which he’d died, after all. This was the sort of place in which her entire family had died, taking her along with them.

She watched others come and go. Most were afraid, eying each other passenger and wondering whether this one or that one was a reanimated corpse. She knew no fear, for she no longer cared. No force, living or dead, had any answers for her.

But at the next station, she felt fear again, as the doors opened to reveal another who was also fearless, though for different reasons.

The man who entered the car wore a hooded sweatshirt, even though the weather had been warm that day, and on his back he carried an olive backpack. Paula tried to read his expression, but there was no expression there to read, and that told her everything she needed to know.

“Don’t do it!” she shouted, no longer desiring what came after.

Then came the explosion, brighter than the sun, and then the darkness, as black as death.





Paula heard no screaming as she came to, and she thought at first that the explosion had deafened her by shattering her eardrums. But as she lifted her head, she could see that the reason there was no screaming was because she was the only one on the train left alive. She was on her back, and as she moved her hands about her to rise, her fingers swept against glass that had been blown from the windows.

She sat up in the unmoving train, and through the smoke could see the bodies of the few other occupants of the car that had been brave enough to ride the tube. She had been furthest from the bomber and had only been knocked out, but the half-dozen others had been lifted and thrown against the walls of the train.

She felt an odd sense of cognitive dissonance; it was as if she was visiting the past. This is what her father’s last home had looked like, filled with smoke and dust and blood. But somehow she had escaped her family’s fate. She leaned against the buckled walls as she moved along the car. She walked gingerly past the dead, the blood streaming from their ears, and threw herself against the door, which would not budge. She looked nervously at the dead, knowing what would happen next.

She had to get out.

Then she saw him, the cause of all this. Or what was left of him. A head, its hair matted with blood, was on the floor, facing away from her. The body that had supported it was nowhere to be seen. She approached the head slowly, circling it and then pushing at it with her toes so she could stare into its face. Yes, it was him. He had thought that he would be in heaven soon, but there was no heaven waiting for him in this new world.

She removed her jacket and kicked the head into the center of the cloth, hands shaking. She tied the corners together so that she could carry her burden along without having to touch it. She had to hurry, for not only would the others soon come back to life, filled with hunger, but she could hear the sounds of rescuers approaching as well, and both living and dead would only be obstacles to her now. She tucked the package under one arm, crawled through a shattered window, and ran down the tracks as quickly as she could in the opposite direction of the voices.





Back at the morgue, Paula unwrapped her parcel and put the head upright on a plate, balanced on its ragged neck. She knew that she might need to move it again, but she never wanted to have to touch it. She placed it on one of the operating tables, turning it carefully away from her, away from her father, so that all she could see was the back of its head. But then she turned it back again, so that she could watch it as she sat by her father. She needed to see the transformation when it came.

The sounds in the room had lessened since the dead first began to wake, but only by degree. The dead feet that had been pounding ceaselessly on the metal doors for hours had splintered, and the throats that roared their anger were wearing away. She imagined that if she could survive here long enough that she would see their bodies break down entirely, just like the systems that kept civilization humming seemed about to do. She wasn’t sure that she could get home again even if she wanted to. And she wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

She stared at what remained of a man who was willing to die for an ideology. Or, as it turned out, someone who was willing to do something even worse than that, not to die, but to choose a living, mindless death. He and others like him had hoped to bring down the workings of the modern world, but they did no such thing. The zombie plague did what they could not. Yet they still continued, not realizing that their bombs were pointless.

Night fell and morning came again, and there was no change, but then as night fell for the second day, the closed eyes of the terrorist’s head snapped open. In that instant, the sounds from within the refrigerated compartments stopped, as if the dead who were locked away sensed a brother outside who might help them. But no help would be forthcoming, for all the manless head could do was rage.