I spend the rest of the day with the zom heads, getting to know them. It's awkward. None of us wants to be here. We haven't chosen each other for company. We come from different parts of London, Danny from as far out as Bromley. We don't have much in common, except for the fact that we were all killed when the zombies attacked.
"Do you remember much about that day?" I ask Mark. I'm with him, Gokhan and Tiberius on one of the couches close to the mirror.
"No," he says. "I was at school. Things went mad. I was running. I didn't even know why. I was part of a pack, doing what everybody else was. I thought someone had a gun and was shooting people, like they do in America. Then something struck the side of my head and I blacked out. Next thing I knew, I was waking up here, wrapped up tighter than a bloody Mummy."
"What about you?" I ask the others.
They shake their heads.
"We've gone over this dozens of times," Tiberius says. "It was pretty much all we talked about for the first few weeks. Everyone was at school, except Rage, who was in a shopping center with his girlfriend. Zombies attacked. We were bitten. We revitalized here."
"Were you locked into your school?"
Tiberius frowns. "What?"
"The exits were blocked in mine. We couldn't get out."
"What, someone actually stopped you from escaping?" Mark gasps.
"Yeah. We tried two different doors and they were both jammed. What about the mutants?"
"Come again?" Tiberius asks.
"There were mutants at our school, coordinating the zombies, directing them."
"Bull," he snorts.
"No, I'd seen a couple of them before. Ugly mothers with gray hair and yellow eyes. They all wear hoodies."
"You're dreaming," Tiberius insists.
"I'm dead," I snap. "We don't dream."
Tiberius clicks his tongue against his teeth. "So, what, you're saying the attacks were deliberate? That we were targeted?"
"I dunno," I shrug. "I'm just telling you what I saw."
"Hey, Rage, have you heard about this?" Tiberius yells and makes me repeat my story.
"Anybody else see hooded mutants?" Rage asks the rest of the zom heads once I'm done. Everyone's staring at me, having stopped whatever they were doing to listen.
"I didn't see any mutants," Peder says, "but one of the exit doors at my school was locked. I was furious. I'd gone through hell to make it that far. I kept kicking and punching it until the zombies swarmed me." He rubs his upper right arm, where a deep cut runs from the shoulder down to his elbow.
"It's something we wondered about before," Danny says. "How did the zombies get inside the buildings in the first place? Why were there so many of them? Where did they come from? Some of us think we might have been victims of a conspiracy."
"Terrorists," Cathy whispers.
"Get real," I laugh. "You can't think this was a terrorist attack. What, they got sick of bombs and guns, decided to use zombies instead?"
"Chemical warfare," Cathy says seriously. "It's something that terrorists have been exploring for years. Maybe they found a way to reanimate the dead. I mean, unless it's some sort of freak disease, somebody must have set those undead bastards loose on us."
"It could have been aliens," Mark suggests.
Tiberius nods enthusiastically. "That's my vote."
"That's why you're a pair of airheads," Rage jeers. "Aliens! Cathy's right. It was probably cooked up by mad scientists. Whether they were working for foreign powers or not, I don't know. I think it might have been our own guys, that it got leaked accidentally."
"If that was the case, they wouldn't have just struck at the schools," Cathy argues.
"They didn't," Rage responds. "I was in a shopping mall. I heard that there had been attacks at hospitals, airports, all sorts of places."
"Yeah, attacks," Cathy presses. "If it was an accidental breakout, it would have spread from one spot and rippled outwards. But they struck all over London at the same time. Explain that, if it wasn't planned."
There's a troubled silence. I'm disappointed that nobody seems to know any more than I do. I was hoping to find answers, but the zom heads are victims like me, ignorant of what really happened.
"Anybody know if the zombies are still running wild out there?" I ask.
"They don't tell us stuff like that," Peder says. "They don't even tell the teacher's pet what's going on outside, do they, Rage?"
"Bite me," Rage barks, and the others laugh.
"Why's he their pet?" I ask.
"He sucks up to them," Tiberius smirks.
"It's all, Yes, Mr. Reilly, sir! and, No, Mr. Reilly, sir!" Danny jeers.
"Can I help you with anything, Dr. Cerveris?" Gokhan adds. "Do you want me to bend over, so you can stick your needle up my - "
"One more word, eunuch boy, and it'll be your last for a while," Rage says softly, and the teasing stops instantly. He glares around and everyone drops their gaze. Except me.
"Something you want to say?" he growls.
"Yeah," I answer calmly. "Why'd you call him eunuch boy?"
Rage relaxes. "He's Turkish. Half of that lot are eunuchs."
"Hey!" Gokhan objects. "That's racist, innit?"
"Not if it's true," I smirk, and the others laugh. I grin for a moment. Then I recall Tyler and my vow to put my crude ways behind me, and my face drops. Looks like I'll have to try harder in the future. Old habits die hard.
"So nobody knows anything," I mutter. "We don't know how zombies came to be, why they attacked when they did, how they struck in so many different places at once, or what the upshot of it was. The undead might have all been killed or captured, or maybe they're still on the loose and this is the last place on earth where the living can walk around safely."
"It's not," Danny says confidently. "I overheard Reilly talking with one of the other soldiers. He was telling him to shape up or they'd ship him out to a different unit, one that wasn't as tightly secured as this place."
"Well done," Cathy says scathingly.
"What?" Danny whines.
She nods at the mirror. "You know that they're listening. You've just gone and dropped Reilly in it."
"Well, he's one of them," Danny sniffs. "I don't care what happens to him, just like he doesn't really care about any of us."
"Reilly's all right," Peder says.
"Yeah," Danny agrees, "but at the end of the day he's just doing his job. He treats us decently because he's told to. If they told him to put us down, you think he wouldn't?"
There's another long, uneasy silence.
"I thought you guys were better off than me," I say softly. "But you're not, are you? You're prisoners, just like I am."
"Yeah," Mark says when nobody else replies. "But it's not all bad. We could be reviveds. They keep them in huge holding cells, packed in tight together, none of the comforts that they treat us to. And they experiment on them. We don't have to deal with any of that."
"No?" Cathy laughs cruelly. "You're even dumber than I thought, Worm." She points at the mirror again. "What do you think all this is? We're guinea pigs, just like the reviveds. And when Dr. Cerveris and his crew have learned all that they can, we'll be discarded as casually as the others are."
We all stare at the mirror and wonder who's on the other side and what they might be thinking. Then we drift apart and everyone goes to their own part of the room to brood. Some of them shoot me dirty looks every so often, blaming me for reminding them that at the end of the day we're just fancily treated prisoners, at the mercy of those who have absolutely no human reason to show us any.
