'Exactly!' Jack said.
'And what about you?' asked Ianto.
'What do you mean?'
'You were attacked too. How do I know you won't suddenly become one?'
Jack looked at him reprovingly. 'This is me you're talking about, Ianto.'
Ianto shrugged. 'The question still stands.'
Dismissively Jack said, 'I'm different. I know these things aren't real, so I'm hardly going to become one, am I? Give me some credit.'
'OK,' Ianto said quietly. 'But just in case you do become one, can I request permission now, while you're still able to grant it, to shoot you in the head?
Without incurring a pay cut.'
Jack grinned. 'Permission granted,' he said.
Ianto nodded seriously. 'So,' he said, 'how do we persuade Trys that he isn't a zombie?'
Jack straightened from the readout screen which had been collating Trys's physical data and pointed at the sheets of paper in Ianto's hand. 'Well, I'm kinda hoping you've got the answer right there. That's all the stuff you could find from the night the pod came down?'
Ianto brandished the sheaf of papers in his hand. 'Press coverage, police reports, energy readings. .'
'And I'm guessing, from the way you scampered across here like an excited puppy, that you've found something?'
Ianto looked pained. 'I don't "scamper". I stride. Briskly but with dignity.'
'I detected a definite scampering motion,' said Jack.
Ianto tutted and shook his head, and returned his attention to the reports in his hand.
'Are you sulking now?' asked Jack.
'No, I'm not sulking,' Ianto replied. 'I'm collating.'
'So collate me,' Jack said.
Ianto pursed his lips and said, 'As you know, the pod came down in Splott three months ago, killing sixty-three people and causing damage to a number of buildings. It was 3.13 a.m. so most of those buildings — retail establishments, warehouses — were empty at the time, but one was occupied.'
'The cinema, right?' said Jack.
Ianto nodded. 'The Regal Cinema on Railway Street, correct. It's a privately run cinema, which has been owned by the — ahem — Adams family since 1897.' He shot Jack a brief glance.
Jack mimed pulling a zip across his mouth. 'My lips are sealed. Carry on.'
'Perhaps what none of us thought to ask,' continued Ianto, 'was why the Regal was occupied at the time.'
Jack shrugged. 'I just assumed there was a private screening.'
'And you'd be right. But of what?'
'Adult movies, maybe?'
'Wrong,' Ianto said. With a flourish he produced a photocopied handbill and passed it to Jack.
Jack looked at the lurid, blood-dripping letters. 'The All-Night Zombie Horror Show,' he murmured. 'Let the walking dead entertain you from dusk till dawn.' His eyes scanned the list of movies, and then he looked up with a grin. 'Good work, Ianto.'
'There's more,' Ianto said. 'Sixty-three people died that night, but there were sixty-four in the cinema. The only survivor was twenty-two-year-old Oscar Phillips, of Madoc Road, Splott.'
'And where's Oscar now?' Jack asked.
'He's in a coma in St Helen's Hospital,' Ianto replied.
THIRTEEN
In a hospital bed, linked up to all manner of drips and monitors, lay an unremarkable man. He was not much to look at — slight, bordering on weedy; plain, bordering on ugly; medium height; sandy hair. He had been lying here for over three months now, still and silent. He was fed through a tube, and he breathed with the aid of a respirator. He was bathed once a day and turned regularly to avoid the onset of bedsores. His mother, Clare, who was fifty-one years old (though she looked older), visited him every morning, and sometimes in the evenings too. She talked to him, and read to him, and played him his favourite music — Queen, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen — in the hope that he might twitch a finger or flicker an eyelid in response. But in three months he had done neither of these things, nor anything else besides.
Oscar Phillips slept on while the world passed him by.
Oscar was alone now, not exactly neglected but temporarily abandoned. Something was happening elsewhere in the hospital, something extraordinary, and the staff were understandably distracted. Which was why, when the wave patterns on the EEG machine monitoring his brain activity began to spike and trough crazily, there was no one there to note it; which was why, when his body began to twitch and shudder, there were no witnesses. Behind his eyelids, Oscar's eyes jerked and rolled, as though he was having a nightmare. His lips, which were greased to stop them from drying out, parted with a tiny pop and he released a low, wordless moan.
Gwen took out half a dozen zombies before realising it was hopeless. It was evident, from those she could see through the gap in the splintered noticeboard nailed across the broken window, that considerably more than the original twenty or so were now massing outside the house. She wondered briefly what had drawn them here — the smell of fresh meat? Some kind of telepathic communication? Whatever it was, they were now breaching the house's meagre defences, driven by the only instinct they knew — the instinct to kill and devour.
Above her, Gwen could hear pounding feet, as Rhys and the Samuelses raced upstairs. She fired off one more round, dropping another zombie in a spatter of blood and brains, and then she set off after them.
'We need somewhere we can defend. An attic or something,' she shouted as she ran up the stairs.
When she reached the upper landing, Keith was hovering underneath a square wooden panel in the ceiling, whilst behind him Naomi was clutching Jasmine, both of them shaking with fear. Keith looked pale and vaguely startled, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Gwen recognised the signs, knew that the trauma of the situation had rendered him almost incapable of action.
'Where's Rhys?' she said, looking around.
Keith stared at her blankly.
Exasperated, Gwen said, 'Have you got a ladder, Keith? We need a ladder.'
'It's all right, love, I've got a chair,' Rhys said, emerging from Jasmine's bedroom, pushing a typing chair on castors.
'Rhys, I could snog you,' she exclaimed.
'Save it till later. I'll hold the chair, you climb up.'
From down below came the sound of more wood splintering, and then a crashing thump, followed by what could only be described as a blundering inrush of movement.
They're through, Gwen thought as she leaped on to the chair and raised her hands above her head. She pushed the wooden panel with all her strength, and experienced a brief, panicky moment when she thought it wasn't going to give. Then it popped up so suddenly that she almost lost her balance. She shoved the panel to one side, hauled herself up until her head was poking through the gap and peered into the darkness.
Immediately dust ambushed her, making her sneeze, and sneeze again. The third time she did it, she thought angrily: I haven't got time for this! She wiped her streaming nose and eyes with her sleeve and saw that directly in front of her was a folding metal ladder on a hinge. Ignoring the ache in her hip, she scrambled up into the attic, unfolded the ladder and pushed it down through the hole.
'Quickly!' she shouted.
'Women and children first,' said Rhys, all but wrenching Jasmine out of her mother's grasp and plonking her halfway up the ladder. Gwen was afraid the girl would freeze, but Jasmine scuttled up the ladder like a mouse. Naomi followed, Gwen reaching down to grab her hand and haul her up. Then came Keith, with Rhys bringing up the rear.
Rhys was on the bottom rung of the ladder, his face dangerously close to Keith's slippered feet, when Gwen, looking down through the gap, saw the green-black face of a zombie suddenly pop into view halfway up the stairs.