Undead (9780545473460) by Kirsty McKay Page B

last here, yeah?”
    â€œNot at all.” I tilt the card a little. “It’s all exactly how I remember it. Miserable weather, smart-ass boys.” I feel something shift in the lock.
Yes!
One more wiggle of the card and the bolt springs back into place, the handle turns, and Houston, we have liftoff . . .
    â€œYou did it!” Smitty can’t believe it, and frankly, neither can I.
    â€œJust a little trick I picked up in the ’hood,” I mutter, and pull the door open.
    We bundle in way too quickly, given that we don’t know what’s waiting for us, but it’s too cold to hang outside.
    The small room is greenish-gray, like a hospital. There’s a dirty, paisley-patterned couch, and a chaotic mess of a desk. The room smells musty, as if it’s been shut up for days, and there’s a layer of dust on everything. Boxes — filled with large, blue bottles of disinfectant — are piled high on either side of the room. It’s immediately obvious that we’re here alone. If anyone is hiding behind the couch, they’re anorexic. I check anyway, then close the door to the outside. The latch snaps into place; we’re safe. Well, unless there are any dribbling fiends wielding credit cards to jimmy the lock.
    We look for the obvious — a phone that works, a computer, a stash of weapons — and come up short. It’s discouraging in the extreme: kind of like waking up Christmas morning and finding the presents under the tree are the same as what you got last year. And broken.
    â€œVotes for leaving Malice and Petey in there?” Smitty stands by the door to the café.
    I don’t smile. He’s not off the hook with me yet. Not by a mile.
    â€œSadly, the food’s that way, too.” Smitty unlatches the door. Pete is still bending over the keypad. I bet he’s been at it all this time.
    â€œGareth?” he says. “Laptop?”
    â€œNope and nope,” I say. “No PC, either. I guess we traveled back in time to before they invented proper offices.”
    â€œHmm,” Pete says. “The laptop would have been nice, but the wireless has gone AWOL anyway. I tried to pick it up on Smitty’s smart phone when we got here. Now Alice is climbing on tables, trying to get a signal.” He waves a hand in the direction of the seating area. “Nothing. Is there a landline?”
    â€œLike everything else around here, dead.” Smitty holds a white plastic receiver in his hand. “Couldn’t they give us a single break?”
    Pete sits down, paler than pale, on the grubby couch. “I think
they
meant to make it as hard as possible.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I say.
    He scratches his head, and I wince when I see he’s scrubbed off a bit of fresh scab. “The people who have done this. They’ve disabled all the usual ways of escape, made it virtually impossible to contact the outside world.”
    â€œEh?” Smitty leans against the desk. “Who’s
they
?”
    Pete shrugs. “The government. The military. The New World Order. Whoever orchestrated this and is using us like rats in a lab.”
    I stare at him, openmouthed. When he doesn’t elaborate, I look at Smitty, but he’s wearing the same expression as me. I turn back to Pete. “Are you kidding me? You think that this is all on purpose? What’s happened, with everyone . . . getting ill?”
    â€œYou mean everyone dying and coming back to life,” Smitty corrects me.
    â€œOK, so we’re going to talk about this now?” I realize I’m still holding my ski pole, and fling it to the ground. “We don’t know it’s true that they died. For all we know, this is some whacked-out Scottish Flu.” I’m saying it, but I’m not entirely buying it.
    â€œYeah, or rabies.” Smitty
drips
sarcasm. “Or they were off their trolleys on shrooms or speed.”
    â€œFace