Bite Me, Zombie Boy [one-shot] [boyxboy]

Bite Me, Zombie Boy

A/N: So, the one-shot request is NOT open. But Blondie is an old friend from way back when I first started posting stories online and is the reason I got into writing boyxboy in the first place, so when she said she wanted to read a zombie story, I got on that shit. Go check out her work if you haven't before, it's bomb. Also, vote, comment, etc, thanks!

The energy in the SUV was that of nervous anticipation. Even though we'd spent the previous two weeks together, we hadn't exactly had a lot of free time to get to know one another, so although we kept catching each other glancing, nobody said anything. I wasn't really in the mood to talk anyway.

There were five of us. I knew their names and majors, but that was about it. Renee, Virology. Chris, Immunology. Felix, Genetics. Kristen, Pathology. And me, Biochemistry. We were all the best students in our individual fields - we wouldn't have been chosen otherwise - but, naturally, Renee was the biggest shot in the barrel and she seemed especially jittery. We wouldn't know the details of our assignments until we arrived, but we all assumed she would be appointed to Patient Zero.

I gazed through the window as the driver turned off the highway; we were still a couple of hours away from the IH299 Facility, the exact whereabouts of which had been kept a secret from us and most of the rest of the world until now. What was becoming clear was that it was secreted away in the mountainous woods under heavy security. We were still over a hundred miles out and we'd already passed two checkpoints.

I wasn't complaining though; the security was necessary. Contrary to how I feel in my day to day life; lately, I felt much safer every time I saw a guy with a gun.

I had just turned thirteen when the news reports started popping up; first every couple of weeks, then more frequently; cases doubling, tripling, quadrupling in South America, then Middle America, and finally... Patient Zero. It didn't matter how strongly the government reinforced the borders; it didn't matter when they closed them; it didn't matter when they quarantined every single Canadian citizen who'd traveled further south than Windsor in the previous six months. The virus got in, as viruses do.

And, as viruses do, it spread.

Rapidly.

Without prejudice.

I don't know a single person who didn't lose someone.

For me, it was my dad.

I remember him coming home from work one day and muttering those fateful words: 'I think I'm coming down with something.'

There was no rationalising with my mom. My dad tried to convince her it was fine, just a head cold, at worst the flu; the guy a couple cubicles down from him had had it the week before and he was fine now, just wait and see.

So she took him into their room and closed the door and stripped him down and searched every crevice of his body and found it; the tiny lump of a mosquito bite, just behind his left ear. She immediately called the government's hotline and within an hour he'd been taken and so had we, away to one of the Orange Zones to be thoroughly checked for contamination and then to one of the Green Zones, virus-free and contained for own safety. I don't know what happened to my dad, but I imagine it involved a bullet to the head. I hope he didn't turn anyone else. I hope he didn't hurt anyone.

It took three long years but eventually the governments and armies of the western world started to gain control of the situation; eradicating mosquitos completely and annihilating all but a handful of the infected humans, detaining them in specialised facilities around the world for study. Slowly life started to return to normal, or some semblance of it; in the wake of what had happened a lot more kids my age were going into STEM fields of study and hundreds of thousands of us had applied for the government's IH299 student research summer program. At nineteen, I was pretty sure I was the youngest chosen candidate.

The other four and I had spent two weeks at a pre-clearance facility; despite the fact that they'd run extensive background checks on every candidate at each stage of the process we'd still needed to go through rigorous training and instruction regarding how to behave, what we were and weren't allowed to do, and how to interact with the Infected when we did finally get to interview them.

I was shaken out of my reverie as the SUV finally came to a stop and I refocused from the middle distance back onto what was actually going on outside the window; we'd reached the final checkpoint and our driver was talking to an armed guard while two others inspected our vehicle. After a few minutes we were given the all clear and the gates opened; we drove through slowly and the others leaned over to look outside as well.

It was big. Really big. I could see a dozen separate buildings from where we were idling and I knew that others stretched back for miles. Armed military personnel were everywhere; it seemed like there were three or more for every scientist and doctor and technician on site.

We were driven slowly through the central campus until we finally rolled to a stop outside a long, low building that had less security but still looked intimidatingly defended.

Unsure of how to proceed, the other students and I remained where we were, not even daring to remove our seatbelts until the driver got out and opened the door on the far side of the SUV. Haltingly, we slid outside as well.

It was early June and the sun was shining but I still couldn't repress the shiver than ran up my spine as goose pimples erupted along my arms; there was something incredibly creepy and uncomfortable about the whole situation. Not for the first time, I regretted even submitting myself for this thing.

The door of the building we'd parked in front of opened and a severe-looking woman in her late forties and wearing military khakis emerged, striding towards us purposefully. She introduced herself as Major Tremblay and led us inside; we went through the motions of having our biometrics measured and logged; irises, fingerprints, facial recognition. Our bags were taken, searched, and returned, and eventually the Major led us past the security station and further into the building, down hallways and up stairs until eventually we reached the dormitories. The rooms were simple: single bed, desk, wardrobe, each walled off from the others around a central communal area.

She left us with instructions not to wander without supervision; that somebody would be along in an hour to escort us to dinner; that work would start the following morning.

Once she'd closed the dormitory door behind her we all sort of stood around in the communal area with our bags awkwardly, glancing at one another and not really saying anything. Eventually, Renee shrugged, leaned down to pick up her duffel, and disappeared into her room, closing the door behind her. Wordlessly, we followed suit.

I woke up early the following morning; my room didn't have a window but a cursory glance at my watch told me it was just after sunrise, and I swung my legs over the side of my bunk, rubbing my eyes tiredly. I hadn't gotten much sleep. I was nervous and anxious and felt a tight ball of something in the pit of my stomach. I'm not sure how I was supposed to feel, having achieved this, having gotten to come here and be a part of this. Many of my classmates had been incredibly jealous; my professors had been excited; my mom had been... Well, I couldn't think about that now. I just felt kind of... Sick.

I splashed some water on my face at the sink beside my bed and glanced in the mirror; my dark hair was messy, my eyes looked sunken and tired. I looked dead. I looked like them.

Not long after I'd gotten dressed, the door to the communal area outside opened and somebody started knocking on the bedroom doors; I opened mine and emerged to see the others doing likewise as three lower-ranking soldiers in khakis stood to attention in the centre of the room. They called out our names and one of them took Renee and Felix; Chris and Kristen went with another; I followed the third. He led me back through the building the way we'd come the previous day, past the security station inside the main door, and bundled me into a Jeep, silently driving me through the campus towards the Biotech buildings.

Again with the security-on-steroids: my biometrics were checked against the measurements they'd taken the previous day, and I was issued a temporary badge with my picture on it that would get me in and out of the building with relative ease. I was ushered past glass-fronted labs and secured offices by my escort until eventually he deposited me wordlessly in a centralised waiting area. Unsure of what to do with myself, I dropped onto one of the couches there awkwardly and sat on the edge of it, looking around and trying not to seem too suspicious or out of place.

Everything was white. The lighting was bright and the whole building felt incredibly sterile. I mean, I was used to this sort of thing; the labs at school were much the same, but there's a difference between the room where my lab partner makes walrus noises while tucking pipettes under his top lip and... This.

'Mr Perkins.'

I swivelled around to look behind me; an older-looking man with dark hair greying at the temples smiled expectantly at me.

'Yes,' I said, standing up quickly, straightening my shirt and moving towards him to proffer my hand. 'That's me.'

'Good to meet you,' he said; he was wearing a white lab coat with his badge pinned to the left breast pocket. 'I'm Dr Williams, I'll be one of your advisors while you're here at IH299 with us.' He shook my hand and turned, leading me down another hallway. I tripped after him hurriedly. 'I read your submission project for the internship program several months ago,' he went on. 'Very impressive. I don't have much influence over the choices ultimately, but I was pleased when I was told it was you.'

'Thank you,' I mumbled, thrown. I mean, I know I'm a good student. And it wasn't exactly the first time I'd heard my submission was good: my professors had all read it and said the same, and I'd won, obviously. But it seemed like kind of a bigger deal coming from the doctor in charge of vaccine research and development at IH299 than from anybody else.

'Now, naturally, you won't get to do a lot of hands-on lab work while you're here,' he warned me. 'You've only just finished your first year at university, and even though you're here at the government's behest that would be a mountain of liabilities for me. But that doesn't mean you won't get to have some fun. You'll get to work under some of the foremost researchers in the field; you'll get to read and review documents that your professors can only dream of getting their hands on - you've signed your NDA already, haven't you? - and, of course, you'll get to work closely with our test subject.'

'Test subject?' I breathed. 'You've moved onto human testing?'

He looked at me and grinned. 'Not quite. Ah. Here we are.'

He pulled his badge from it's extender cord to press it against the scanner by the side of the door, then leaned in to have it scan his iris as well. With a pneumatic hiss, to door opened, and I followed him inside.

'This is our main reading room,' he explained as I looked around. Again, everything was white; one wall was lined with heavy books and two others had rows of locked filing cabinets stretching the length of the room. The fourth had a trio of desks with computers sitting atop them. 'You'll be spending a lot of time in here,' Dr Williams said, his eyes crinkling as he smiled at me. 'But don't worry; it won't be as boring as it seems. As I said, you won't get to spend a lot of time in the labs but you'll get to read about everything that we've been doing in here. I assure you; it's very exciting stuff.'

'I believe you,' I said, still kind of awed. Whatever discomfort I felt about being at IH299, I was right at home in a setting like this. Losing myself in research for the next three months sounded pretty ideal.

'Excellent. Now, obviously, there's no food allowed here, or anywhere really other than the cafeterias. There's one on this floor; you go to the end of the hallway here,' he pointed towards the door we'd just walked through, 'take a left, then two rights, and you're there. I don't believe you've had breakfast yet?'

I shook my head.

'Well why don't you go on down there for an hour and get yourself fed. I'll meet you back here at...' He checked his watch. 'Eight-thirty, and get you settled with some reading. How does that sound?'

'Yeah,' I said. 'Good. Perfect.'

I did as I was told, trying not to get lost, and duly arrived back at the reading room a half hour early. Dr Williams wasn't there yet so I loitered, hoping I wouldn't get called out by security for being suspicious and wondering whether I should just badge myself in and wait for him inside. Eventually I figured it couldn't hurt to at least try, so I did, and almost to my surprise the door hissed open after I'd levelled my eye to the scanner so, feeling weirdly like I was breaking the rules, I slipped inside.

Once there I hesitated; the room was empty but I suspected there was a security camera and I didn't want to try and access the computers or any of the files in case I wasn't strictly allowed. Finally, I wandered to the end of the room where the book shelves were and perused them carefully; they were all heavy duty, intense, deeply specific tomes on vaccinology and biochemistry. I pulled one out and flipped it open, falling into one of the chapters and, almost unconsciously, dropping to the floor in a cross-legged position to hunch over it.

I jumped a few minutes later in surprise when the door hissed again and opened; I sat, frozen like a kid who's been caught taking candy without permission, as Dr Williams and another man entered, talking quietly.

'... be ready to start in a few weeks time?'

'Yes,' Dr Williams was nodding. 'We're in the final stages of mice testing. I just need Laurent to sign off on it. He's being difficult; you know how he is. He'll come around.'

The other man nodded as well. 'He's always been over-cautious.'

Dr Williams laughed and the other man did too. He turned to walk over to one of the filing cabinets and unlock it; feeling like I'd been eavesdropping on purpose I cleared my throat awkwardly. They both whipped their heads around in my direction; still sitting on the floor with a book the size of my torso, I felt childish and uncomfortable.

Dr Williams frowned. 'Mr Perkins,' he said stonily. 'You're back already.'

'I was worried I'd get lost,' I explained. 'So I came back early...'

He and the other man glanced at one another, but then he smiled at me again and gestured to his colleague. 'This is Mr Walker; the vice president of Fleming Pharmaceuticals.'

'Oh,' I said, hesitating and then scrambling to my feet. 'Nice to meet you,' I muttered, tripping forwards to shake his hand.

'This is Mr Perkins,' Dr Williams said. 'Our intern for the summer.'

'Very impressive,' Mr Walker said, clearly humouring me.

Dr Williams found the file he was looking for and locked the cabinet again, handing it to Mr Walker. I glanced at the file name as it passed in front of me; Operation Remedium. I frowned. That couldn't be right.

'It seems you've already found some reading material to interest you for now,' Dr Williams went on, returning his attention to me. 'Why don't you continue with that and I'll bring you some of our own research papers after lunch?'

Looking back to him, I nodded slowly, my mind still on that file but careful not to show it. Instead I went and collected the book from where I'd left it on the floor by the shelves, moving towards the round table at the centre of the room and setting myself up at one of the chairs under their gaze.

'Good. I'll have somebody check in on you later.'

I smiled in thanks and he and Mr Walker left, the door hissing closed behind them. Still wary that I was probably being filmed, I glanced out of the corner of my eye towards the cabinet he'd taken the file from. There was nothing seemingly special about it; it didn't look any different to the others stacked on either side of it and he'd definitely locked it again after him.

I shook myself internally. Not that that made any difference. It wasn't like I was going to snoop.

Sternly instructing myself not to think about it, I poured back over the book, trying to focus on the content rather than speculate about the name of the file and whether it meant what it meant, and whether that meant what I thought it meant, and if so, why Laurent, whoever he was, was being so over-cautious.

But it's kind of hard to focus on gluconeogenesis when there's so much speculation to be had.

So I switched to molecular cloning.

As promised, Dr Williams sent some of his own research for me to study after lunch; the files were sitting on the reading table when I got back from the cafeteria and they, at least, were a lot easier to get wrapped up in than the books I'd been perusing. I couldn't help it; the research was fascinating and though it had to be a lot more preliminary than what the facility was working on now, considering he'd hinted that they'd moved on to human or at least primate testing, I was still interested to see how they'd come from this and built on it to whatever they were doing now.

At seven that evening the door hissed open once again and Dr Williams appeared with a smiling enquiry about how I'd enjoyed my first day; I followed him out of the room and back to the central waiting area he'd collected me from that morning, where the soldier who'd escorted there was waiting to take me back to the dormitory building. I ate dinner with the others; still we didn't say much to one another but this time I could tell it wasn't shyness or awkwardness or nervousness; this time everyone was thinking, staring into the middle distance, too busy ruminating on the things they'd seen and done and read that day.

After we'd made our way back to our rooms Kristen chanced asking Renee, 'So... Did you meet him?'

But Renee just shook her head. 'Nobody even said anything about him.'

The disappointment was palpable; everybody wanted to know about Patient Zero.

I spent the following week in much the same way as I'd spent the first day; I was escorted to and from the biotech section of the campus by the same guard every day, not that we did a whole lot of getting to know one another; I had breakfast in the cafeteria and spent the morning reading up on branches of my major in the books in the reading room; I went to lunch, and when I got back Dr Williams would have sent files from his own work for me to study. Suffice it to say, the second half of the day was infinitely more interesting to me than the first.

It also became a sort of in-joke between the rest of the interns and I; every evening once we'd gotten back to our dorms and knew we couldn't get in trouble if somebody overheard us asking, we'd take it turns to question Renee about whether she'd met Patient Zero yet. For now she was playing along and thought it was funny but I couldn't help but wonder at which point she'd lose patience and start wondering whether it was ever going to happen at all.

During my second week, Dr Williams met me in the central waiting area of his division with a broad smile on his face.

'So, Perkins,' he said amicably, as I followed him down the usual brightly lit hallway. 'How would you feel about taking a little break from all that reading this afternoon and coming to take a look around one of our labs?'

I couldn't really hide my excitement, but he seemed pleased as I turned big eyes on him.

'I'll take that as a yes,' he laughed.

I made sure I got back from lunch early and sat waiting in the reading room; shortly after two pm a lower-level assistant appeared and escorted me down more endless hallways, through pneumatic doors, and past ever more intense security before depositing me on a bench in a hallway with no windows and very few doors. After a few moments one of those doors opened and a higher-ranking assistant pushed a lab coat and a pair of safety goggles on me and ushered me inside; I gazed around the lab in something akin to wonder.

I went to one of the top universities in the country and had access to some of the finest labs and lab equipment in that university, but I was quickly realising that I may as well have been playing with a Fisher-Price microscope for the past year compared to the level the IH299 labs were on.

Biochemists and technicians and assistants worked silently over their research in glassed-off sections of the lab, the whirring and hissing of various pieces of equipment drowning out their occasional quiet discussion.

The assistant led me through the centre of all of this, down along the main aisle of the lab, which seemed to stretch for the length of a city block, until we reached a plain-looking office door at the end, on which she knocked. Whoever was inside shouted an acquiescence and she opened it, gesturing for me to enter.

When I did I saw Dr Williams sitting at a desk at one end; he glanced up distractedly as he continued writing in a ledger and said, 'Ah, Mr Perkins, there you are. What do you think of our set-up so far?'

'It's amazing,' I said honestly. 'I've never even dreamed of a lab like this.'

'It suits our purposes,' he joked, finishing up with his work and beginning to stand. 'I'll show you around, let you have a peek over the shoulders of some of our scientists. I'm sure I don't have to remind you not to touch anything.'

'Of course not.'

Most of the work I got to observe that day was pretty banal; I wouldn't have been allowed into the building if they'd been doing anything new or groundbreaking. There was a lot of data-logging, re-running of samples, and machine maintenance.

I spent a few weeks in this loop; most mornings I sat in the reading room and poured over other people's research, and on one afternoon per week I got to follow an assistant around the labs and see some of it in action.

One day after I'd been at IH299 for almost a month, I was shown into one of the glassed-off sections of the lab that I hadn't been in before. Here, a much older man with grey hair and thick glasses was working quietly over some files.

'This is Dr Laurent,' the assistant told me. 'Doctor, this is Perkins, this intern.'

The man looked up and peered at me through his glasses for a moment before smiling. 'Pleasure to meet you, at last,' he said. 'You'll have to excuse my absence over the past couple of weeks; I was working underground. How are you finding your stay here?'

'Good. Great. Everything is...' I trailed off, unable to find anything to say as I wondered what he meant about being underground.

'Kind of overwhelming?' he supplied, his eyes sparkling, and I nodded. 'I felt that way when I first got here, as well,' he confided. 'Why don't you come around here and take a look at what I'm doing? You can leave us, Swanepoel,' he added to the assistant who'd been showing me around, and with a shrug she did as she was bid.

I moved around to his side of the bench to look at what he'd been reading.

'These are my notes from the work I was doing last week,' he told me. I frowned; I knew that ostensibly I was looking at the results of blood tests but the levels were way off.

It took me a second.

'Oh my god,' I muttered eventually, and he laughed as I looked up at him, wide-eyed. 'Are these...?'

He nodded, and it finally slipped into place what he'd meant when he'd said underground. Of course they were keeping the Infected underground.

'Whoa,' I muttered, looking more closely at the numbers.

'Is this the closest you've ever been?' Dr Laurent asked, eyebrows raised.

I stood up straighter and cleared my throat, adjusting my lab coat and trying not to bit my lip. 'Sort of,' I mumbled. 'My dad...' I trailed off. 'But I never saw any of them after the virus properly took hold. Not in real life, just on the news.'

Dr Laurent nodded sympathetically, putting one hand on my shoulder for the briefest moment before mercifully moving the conversation along.

'You must be getting bored of spending every day in that reading room,' he said. 'Why don't we see if we can increase your clearance and you can assist me in the afternoons?'

I felt my eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

He laughed. 'Don't get too excited; I spend a lot of time doing exactly what you've been doing since you got here, but you'll have access to more of the research and it will look very good on your final assessment.'

I nodded, speechless.

So that was how I passed the next couple of weeks. I sat in my usual spot most mornings and then somebody came for me in the afternoon and I spent four or five hours with Dr Laurent, reading and discussing his research, assisting him when he re-ran old tests, and bringing him files he needed from the reading room.

And then, a month and a half after I'd arrived at IH299, halfway through my internship, Dr Laurent greeted me one afternoon with a broad smile and twinkling eyes. We'd spent so much time together and gotten to know one another well enough at this point that I knew something was up; I narrowed my eyes at him warily and asked, 'What?'

His smile widened further. 'Follow me,' he said simply, so I did what I was told, hurrying after his long gait as we left the labs and tripping to keep up as he led me down yet more interminable hallways, past ever more stringent security, and eventually into an elevator. I held my breath as he reached for the floors, wondering if he could possibly be taking me where I thought he was taking me, and let it out when he hit an unlabelled white button sitting by itself at the bottom of the panel.

The elevator began to descend, and a full minute later came to a slow stop. The doors hissed open and I peered out through them, feeling anxiety and trepidation and excitement.

He was taking me to see the Infected.

There were armed military personnel everywhere. I mean, they were everywhere upstairs as well, but down here, they were everywhere. I felt a lump of fear materialise in my throat. Logically I knew I was safe. There hadn't been an incident at IH299 in its entire history; it was unlikely that today would be the day.

But still.

I'd never been up close to one; nobody I knew had. Even though the virus had spread rapidly, the government had seen it coming and had had time to adequately prepare. The way it had gone down with my dad was pretty much the way it went down for everyone. Very few people in this country had ever been up close and personal with one once the virus properly took hold. Only 8% of the overall Infected had contracted the virus as a result of being bitten by former humans. That other 92% had been all mosquitos.

I followed Dr Laurent silently; the atmosphere was pretty sedate but even if it hadn't been, I was too nervous to even think of anything to say. He badged and biometric'd his way past three different reinforced steel doors before finally we emerged, alone, in an unoccupied hallway. All down one side were thick glass windows, behind which were brightly lit rooms each containing a table, two chairs, a bed, a sink, and... One of them.

'Oh my god,' I finally managed to whisper, and Dr Laurent smiled at me.

'Don't be frightened,' he told me. 'They can't get out of the tanks.'

I gazed through one of the windows at what had once been a middle-aged woman as she sat on her bed, staring into the middle distance, unmoving. Through another window, an older man paced back and forth across his room, endlessly.

'Here we are,' Dr Laurent said, stopping in front of the third window. A teenage boy sat on one of the chairs on one side of the table, thrown casually across it and taking up as much space as possible. His dirty-blonde hair was a mess on his head and he was bouncing a tennis ball across the room, where it hit the floor, then the window, then rebounded into his hand. 'Patient Zero.'

I inhaled sharply, almost choking. 'This is Patient Zero?' I asked.

Dr Laurent nodded. 'What were you expecting?'

I shrugged, gazing in at him. 'Something else,' I admitted. 'Something... Scarier.'

Dr Laurent nodded. 'That's understandable. But this is him.'

I jumped back as the ball bounced against the window directly in front of my face, and when he caught it he looked up, his eyes locking with mine. I felt suddenly uncomfortable, like I was looking at an animal at the zoo which, in a way, I suppose I was. Except somehow, I felt like I was the one being watched.

'Pay no attention,' Dr Laurent counselled me as I tried and failed to break eye contact with him. 'He's just trying to intimidate you. I assure you, they're all harmless as long as they're in here. We keep them mostly sedated.'

'How?' I asked.

'Well, simply, we control their food source.'

'You don't feed them...?'

'Not brains, no. They can survive on other organs, so we feed them those. We get them from a local hospital. Mostly livers, kidneys, the occasional heart if they're cooperating. It would be a bit like you or I subsisting on crackers. It keeps them malleable, but very low energy.'

'Huh. So they don't... Attack?'

'There's a strict procedure for being in the same room as one. Four armed guards enter first; three keep their rifles aimed squarely at his head while the fourth chains his arms and legs to each other and to the floor. They're very, very strong - as you can probably imagine. Even when kept this sedated they could crack your skull like a sugar shell. The chains are stronger than the steel beams that hold up high-rises.'

'Whoa.'

Dr Laurent turned and smiled at me again. 'Would you like to meet him?'

Finally, I managed to break eye contact with Patient Zero. 'Meet him?!' I exclaimed, horrified, whipping my head around to look at the doctor. 'As in... Go in there?'

He laughed. 'Of course. The three of us will be working very closely together for the remainder of the summer. You may as well say hello.'

I swallowed. 'Like... Alone?'

'Well, I can certainly go in with you if you'd like. But a word of advice: they can smell fear. And he won't respect you if he thinks you need me to hold your hand.'

I swallowed again, and found myself nodding against my better judgement. 'Okay,' I said hoarsely. 'Steel beams, right?'

He laughed again. 'Right. Here.' He reached into the pocket of his lab coat and handed me a small device I recognised; a taser. 'Nothing is ever going to happen,' he reassured me. 'But if it does, use this. Keep it on your person at all times. Not in your satchel. It won't do much more than confuse him, but it will give the soldiers on the other side of that door more than enough time to get in there and resolve any situation that might arise.'

I took it cautiously. 'I wouldn't have thought it would even confuse them,' I muttered.

'In the wild, it wouldn't,' he conceded. 'But since we keep them so sedated...' he trailed off and I watched as he walked back to the door we'd come in through, pressing a button at a panel on the wall and speaking into it briefly. A door at the other end of Patient Zero's room slid open and the four armed guards I'd been told about walked in. The teenager looked annoyed, rolling his eyes and holding out his wrists exaggeratedly as the soldier I imagined had pulled the short straw approached him with the chains and got to work. When they were finished they left again the way they'd gone in; Patient Zero locked eyes with me again through the glass.

'Ready?' Dr Laurent asked, and, again against my better judgement, I nodded. He entered some numbers, scanned his badge, and levelled his iris with a scanner on the wall beside the window; a steel panel hissed and slid to the side.

My heart jumped to my throat. It was open. The door was open. If he could break through those chains, he could just get up and walk out of the room. That felt incredibly unsafe.

Glancing at Dr Laurent, who nodded encouragingly, I stepped through the panel and jumped when it hissed closed again behind me. However unsafe it felt for him to be able to leave, it felt even more dangerous to be locked in here with him.

I hesitated before taking breath and walking over; he watched me carefully the whole time as I dropped into the chair on the opposite side of the table, my back to Dr Laurent.

I cleared my throat, unsure of what to do next. 'Hi,' I said lamely.

'Hi,' he replied. He looked me up and down; he seemed cynical, unimpressed. With a jolt of surprise, I realised he seemed like a regular seventeen-year-old. I jumped a little when he sat forward suddenly and leaned across the table, smiling. 'I'm Riley.'

Fighting the urge to push my chair backwards, I managed to reply hoarsely, 'I think I'm just supposed to call you Patient Zero.'

'And what am I supposed to call you?' he asked archly, leaning back in his seat again.

I wasn't sure. I didn't have a position or title. 'I'm Thomas,' I said, still sounding lame to my own ears. 'Thomas Perkins.'

'Hi Thomas Perkins,' he said, then repeated, 'I'm Riley.'

I stared at him for a moment, and then, not really sure why, I smiled weakly. 'Hi, Riley.'

He smiled back. 'You're a lot younger than the others. What age are you?'

'Nineteen. I'm just an intern.'

'They let an intern down here?'

'I'm more surprised than you,' I told him feebly.

'This is a pretty big deal for you, huh? Getting to meet me. I'm like some sort of rockstar. I bet you'll brag about this to your friends later. But I bet you won't tell them how scared you are.' He sniffed the air pointedly.

'Should I not be scared?'

He rattled the restraints. 'Need brains,' he said. He narrowed his eyes at me and leaned forward. 'You've got a big ol' brain,' he observed. 'All full of smarts.'

I nodded. My heart had sped up in fear as he spoke and I knew he could sense it, but some stubborn part of me wanted to remain as calm as I could on the outside. 'And it's all mine,' I told him. That made him grin.

We both turned in surprise as the steel panel hissed and moved again; Dr Laurent stepped into the room, looking pleased.

'Hi, Doc,' Riley said, stretching back languidly in his chair.

'Hello, Zero,' he replied amicably. 'How are you getting along with Thomas?'

'Do I get to eat any bits of him?'

'Unfortunately not.'

'Well enough then, I suppose.'

'Good. You'll be seeing a lot more of one another over the next few weeks.'

'Why? I'm a bit insulted Doc, I thought I was special. Why are you letting dumb interns in here? I thought you had to have minimum two doctorates to be allowed to talk to me.'

Dr Laurent smiled indulgently. 'I don't think Thomas will have any trouble keeping up with you.' He turned to me. 'I think that's enough for today. Why don't we go and get some lunch?'

'Why don't you stay and become some lunch?' Riley asked, tilting his head in my direction, looking up at me with those piercing blue eyes set in deep dark purple sockets.

'That's enough, Zero,' Dr Laurent said sternly as I stood up.

'Hey,' he called, right before we stepped out of the room, and we both turned to look at him. His eyes only met mine though. 'See you tomorrow?'

I looked at Dr Laurent, who seemed to consider it for a second, but then nodded.

'See you tomorrow,' I confirmed. The steel panel slid shut behind us and by the time we walked past his window Riley was already bouncing the tennis ball again, with some difficulty as he was still chained up. Dr Laurent gave the order into the speaker by the door to unchain him as we left, and didn't say another word until we were back in the elevator and returning to the ground floor.

'So,' he asked, turning to look at me. 'What did you think?'

'Surreal,' I breathed. 'Completely surreal.'

'I think he liked you. That's good. It's important to build a rapport with them.'

'I don't want him to like me too much,' I muttered. 'I'm happy to keep my brain where it is.'

The doctor laughed. 'Don't worry. Your brain is perfectly safe.'

Even though I'd already had lunch, I followed him back to the cafeteria, feeling the tense constriction around my chest loosen with every security station we passed. The buffet felt worlds away from Riley's room.

Dr Laurent dismissed me early, and I was grateful, because I was too shellshocked to be fit for much of anything; instead I made my way back to the dorms with my usual guard and looked up from my reverie in surprise, several hours later, when the others returned, wondering why I hadn't been at dinner. I mumbled something about not feeling well and then it was Chris' turn to ask Renee, 'So... Did you meet him?'

She rolled her eyes and shook her head, but everyone turned to me when I cleared my throat.

'Actually,' I said, looking up at their expectant faces. 'I did.'

They stared back at me in shock. 'You... Met Patient Zero?' Felix confirmed.

I nodded. 'Only for a couple of minutes.'

'Well?' Renee demanded, coming to drag a chair across to sit right in front of me. 'What's he like?'

I blinked at her and thought about it for a second before breathing out heavily. 'He's... A kid,' I said weakly. 'He's just a kid.'

I met Dr Laurent outside the labs again the following day and he took me back down to the underground campus, leading me past the intense security and letting me into Riley's room once he was all chained up again.

'So were they impressed?' he demanded, once I'd sat down.

'Impressed?'

'Your friends, when you bragged about getting to meet me,' he reminded me. 'What did they say?'

'They wanted to know what you were like.'

'And what did you tell them?'

'That you're a punk kid.'

Riley blinked and then grinned. 'I'm only two years younger than you,' he reminded me. 'Actually, I'm technically older than you. I got bit five years ago, that makes me twenty-two, chronologically.'

'Except that you don't age,' I told him. 'Or mature.'

'How in the hell am I supposed to mature when I never get to leave this room?' he demanded. 'You can't mature if you don't live.'

'That's not why you don't mature. Don't try to make me feel sorry for you; it won't work.'

Riley scowled at me, but then looked around the room and found something else to talk about.

'What's your deal, anyway? How did you get to come here?'

'I study biochemistry at university,' I told him. 'The government offers a program where students can come and work here for the summer, and I got chosen.'

'So I was right,' he said. 'About your brain.'

I nodded in concession.

'And you get to talk to me because they're going to test the vaccine on me.'

I shook my head. 'I don't know anything about that. I get to talk to you because I work with Dr Laurent. It wouldn't make any sense to test a vaccine on you, though. You already have it.'

Riley pondered this for a moment. 'So a vaccine can't cure me?'

I felt my lips part in surprise and looked at him, feeling inexplicably heartbroken for him. 'No,' I said softly. 'A vaccine can't cure you.'

He scowled at me. 'Don't cry,' he said sarcastically. 'I haven't been wishing on falling stars. I was just trying to figure out why they keep talking about vaccines if there's no point in giving it to me.' He thought a bit more. 'Maybe they're going to give you the vaccine,' he said slyly. 'And let me bite you.'

'Maybe,' I said, playing along. 'If it doesn't work, can I share your room?'

Riley looked up at me in surprise, then quickly rearranged his features to that of a cynical seventeen-year-old. 'Are you flirting with me?' he asked sarcastically.

'Yeah,' I told him, nodding to the security camera in the corner of the room. 'I really want to get in that kind of trouble.'

He looked over at the camera and then back at me. 'There aren't any microphones,' he told me. 'Just video. Shows how much you know.'

'There aren't?'

'Some of the departments don't share research. Double blindness and all that. If they need to record conversations with me they bring their own equipment. That,' he jerked his head at the camera, 'is just to make sure I behave.'

'You know a lot about what goes on around here, don't you?'

'I'm literally the star of the show,' he reminded me.

'That sucks,' I told him.

He looked at me in surprise. I'd only said it because I couldn't think of anything else to say, but I realised as he stared at me that this was probably the first time in a very long time that anybody had empathised with him.

'Yeah,' he mumbled. 'It does.'

We both jumped in surprise again as the steel panel behind me hissed and opened; Dr Laurent stepped in and smiled.

'Geez, Doc,' Riley muttered. 'Is he ever gonna get to stay for more than five minutes?'

'I'm glad you're having such a good time,' he said, smiling at Riley.

'I'm not. I just really like the smell of his brain.' He breathed in deeply, making a point to rattle his chains. 'Invigorating.'

'So what would happen if he - if any of them - were to ever get out?' I asked as Dr Laurent took me back up to the main level.

He grinned at me. 'You're not really worried about that brain of yours, are you?'

I shrugged.

'Well, first of all, the security camera in his room is on him at all times. Each room has its own camera and each camera is connected to its own screen in its own security room. I'll have someone show you Riley's tomorrow. If he were to break his chains, or break the window of his tank, or anything like that, we would know immediately and the whole campus would go into immediate lockdown. No doors would open for any badges except mine, Dr Williams', and General Garcia's. A hundred armed guards would be in there to restrain or, if necessary, kill him within minutes. I assure you, he wouldn't be able to get out of that corridor.'

'But what if he did?'

'He wouldn't. But if he did, he wouldn't get very far. You've seen how many security stations he'd have to get past. And in the frankly impossible event that he got out of the campus - all of them have electromagnetic tracking chips implanted in their necks. It wouldn't take very long to find him.'

'But couldn't he... I mean, I've seen them on TV rip their own limbs off just because they got caught in something. Couldn't he just... Pick it out?'

'He could, it he knew it was there, but he doesn't.'

'Oh,' I breathed, understanding.

'But it would never get that far.'

I nodded. 'Am I going back down there tomorrow?'

'Not tomorrow; I'm afraid I'll be off campus for the day. But like I said, I'll have an assistant show you his security footage. You can bring some books and stay there for the day if you like; the room is secure, and perfectly quiet.'

'Okay,' I agreed. 'Where are you going tomorrow?'

He glanced over at me, grinning. 'You'll get in trouble for asking questions like that some day if you're not careful,' he reprimanded me gently. 'I have some meetings at Fleming Pharmaceutical. I'll helicopter out in the morning and be back by dinner, hopefully.'

'Are you meeting Mr Walker?'

Dr Laurent laughed. 'Maybe,' he told me. 'Now go on. I'll see you on Friday.'

One of his assistants was waiting for me outside the reading room the following morning, and as promised led me down a different series of hallways to a central security station. I walked past banks of monitors with guards sitting in front of them, through some smaller rooms and eventually to a corridor leading off to a number of smaller rooms. The assistant opened the door to one of them and I stepped inside; he closed it again behind me and I knew, somehow, that I was locked in. I wondered if the guard usually assigned to this task had been given the day off for my benefit or if the monitoring was purely technological; running algorithms that set off alarms if Riley did anything unusual.

Carefully, I sat on the swivel chair and peered at the screen; Riley was sitting on his bed with a book, holding the pages open with one hand and tossing his tennis ball up and down with the other.

Watching him like this felt even more inappropriate than when I'd been standing on the other side of the glass, so I busied myself with the immunology book I'd brought with me, glancing at the screen occasionally to see what he was up to. I felt bored and constricted just wondering what there was to do all day when you spent every minute in a three hundred square foot space with no windows, computer, or television. A lot of reading, it turned out.

I wondered if he'd had to learn his patience or if being undead and essentially immortal gave you a greater tolerance for the passage of time.

'Where were you yesterday?' he demanded, as soon as I stepped into the room the next day.

'Watching you,' I told him honestly, pointing at the camera as I sat down.

He looked up at it. 'Creepy.'

'You're not that entertaining.'

'I know that,' he told me archly. 'Like if I had anything else to do I'd be talking to you.'

I grinned. 'I guess that makes me the most interesting thing about you.'

'That or the fact that I'm a literal zombie.'

'Or that,' I conceded.

'Anyway it's not my fault that I'm not entertaining. You try being entertaining when you're stuck in here all day. I don't even have the internet.'

'You're not missing much,' I assured him. 'It's still just neckbeards and cat memes.'

'Hm,' Riley muttered, playing with the hem of his shirt distractedly. 'What did you get up to when you were seventeen?' he asked. 'Did you get to go to school and stuff?'

I nodded. 'I lived in a Green Zone,' I told him. 'So my life was mostly normal.'

'I read a lot,' he said. 'But they only let me have certain kinds of books. I'm not allowed to study any science.'

'Well, you're surrounded by scientists. You could just ask them any questions you have.'

'You're a scientist, right?'

'In training,' I conceded.

'So if I have questions can I ask you?'

I shrugged. 'Sure.'

'Okay. I don't have any now. But I might.'

I smiled. 'Okay.'

'So you got to go to school and be outside and see other people, huh?'

I nodded. 'More or less. There were curfews and a lot of places we couldn't go, because they were dangerous or because they were being used as army bases.' I grinned. 'One night a friend of mine and I snuck out, though. Way past curfew. Like, one or two in the morning. There was going to be a meteor shower and we wanted to go to the park to watch it together. We almost got away with it too; I got home okay but his parents caught him sneaking back in. We got in so much trouble.'

'With the army?'

'No, just with our parents. His dad called my mom and told her. She reamed me.'

Riley grinned. 'Did she tell your dad? That was always the worst for me. If it was just my mom I knew it was going to be okay. But if she told my dad, I knew I was in serious trouble.'

I shook my head, not saying anything, and his face dropped.

'Oh,' he said, looking down before bringing his eyes back to mine. 'We got him, huh?'

I nodded.

'Sorry,' he said awkwardly.

My standard response when people apologise to me about my dad is to say, 'Not your fault,' in an attempt to lighten the situation and make people less uncomfortable, but that wasn't really going to work this time. Technically, it was Riley's fault.

'So your parents both got away without catching it?' I asked, gently changing the subject.

'Yeah. Well.' He shifted around in his chair. 'I knew what was happening, when it started. So I ran away. I didn't want to hurt them. Especially not my little sister. I didn't want to infect them. And I definitely didn't want to eat their brains and get all their memories, that would have been weird. So I left.' He shifted again. 'I asked once if I could see them, or if somebody could just let them know where I am and that I'm still, you know, alive. Sort of. Technically. Not fully dead,' he settled on. 'But they said they couldn't.'

I nodded sympathetically. 'That sucks,' I said again.

'Thanks.'

I knew that Dr Laurent couldn't hear through the glass what we were talking about but I guess he could see we were approaching a lull in the conversation and chose that moment to come in and get me.

'Time's up,' he said, smiling and looking between us expectantly.

'Is he coming back tomorrow?' Riley asked boredly.

'Not tomorrow,' Dr Laurent said easily. 'Maybe the day after.'

Riley wrinkled his nose but didn't say anything else; I followed to doctor back to the elevator deep in thought.

'I think you're really starting to establish a relationship with him,' he told me once we were on our way back to the main floor. 'I have to say, I'm very impressed. It took me months to achieve the level of comfort with him that you've reached after just a few days. Perhaps it's the closeness in age,' he suggested.

I shrugged. 'Maybe. Why am I not seeing him tomorrow? Do you have more meetings?'

'No, tomorrow I have to work with Dr Williams,' he told me. 'You'll be back in the reading room I'm afraid, unless you'd rather study in Riley's security room?'

Again, I shrugged. 'Sure. What are you working on with Dr Williams?'

'Something orders of magnitude out of your security clearance,' he told me, grinning.

'Does it have something to do with your meetings at Fleming yesterday?'

'You know, Perkins,' he said jovially, 'you were a lot easier to work with a month ago when you were easily impressed and scared to step a foot out of line. You've gotten entirely too comfortable.'

I grinned back. 'Sorry. I face down a zombie every day; it's going to my head.'

'Hmm,' he said. 'Well, I'll have Thompson take you back to the security room in the morning. Here, take this.' He reached into his pocket and handed me a small silver key. 'There are some files I want you to read while you're there for us to discuss on Monday. Pick them up from the reading room in the morning and then give the key to Thompson; he'll bring it back to me. You might want to write this down,' he added, and I scrambled in my satchel for a notebook and pen. 'Now these are Fleming documents but you'll find them in the P-S cabinet under P for Pharmaceuticals. This is very basic vaccine stuff, very preliminary; obviously you don't have the clearance for any of the newer research but I'm very curious to see if you can build on the older stuff and arrive anywhere close to where we have.'

I nodded, nervous and excited, scribbling down the names he told me and securing the key in a side pocket of my satchel.

The next morning I arrived at the reading room before Thompson and let myself in, unlocking the cabinet with my key and flipping through the top shelf of files for the ones Dr Laurent had told me to read. I found them all within a few minutes and was about to lock the cabinet again when I caught a glance at the shelf of R files.

I shouldn't.

I definitely shouldn't.

I really, really shouldn't.

I could get in so much trouble.

But... He had given me the key.

And it might not even be there. It couldn't hurt to check.

And if it was, I could just say it was an accident. That I took the file by mistake or that it had been in the middle of one of the ones I was supposed to take and I didn't know how it got in there.

Quickly, and turning my back to the camera so it wouldn't pick up on my movements, I reached down and flipped through the files, snatching the Operation Remedium file and stuffing it in amongst the other files I had permission to take. My heart beating erratically in my chest, I closed the filing cabinet and locked it again, just in time for the door of the reading room to open and Thompson to stick his head around.

I gave him the key, trying not to let my hand shake, and followed him back to the security rooms, spending an hour sitting there reading the other files distractedly and glancing occasionally at Riley before I felt safe enough to open the Operation Remedium one and scan it carefully.

Half of it was redacted, and much of the other half didn't make sense by itself.

But thing was clear.

It meant what I had thought it meant.

Dr Williams and Dr Laurent weren't working on a vaccine.

They were working on a cure.

Shakily, I put the pages back in the file and opened one of the Fleming ones, letting it sit in front of me as I leaned back in the chair and gazed at Riley on the screen, sitting on the floor of his room and bouncing his tennis ball off the opposite wall.

Somebody at IH299 was working on a vaccine. The Fleming files were all vaccine-related. In fact, probably everybody else in the building apart from Drs Williams and Laurent were working in the vaccine. This was so Top Secret that only the two highest-ranking scientists in the campus could possibly be involved.

But then why had the file just been sitting there in a filing cabinet in a relatively low-security reading room that even an intern had access to? Why had Dr Laurent given me a key to it? Why had Dr Williams and the vice president of the biggest pharmaceutical company in the country been talking openly about it without checking if they were alone?

I sat there for hours, just watching Riley move around his room, bouncing his tennis ball, reading his books, and, once, standing directly underneath the camera and waving up at it for a few seconds. Dumbly, I raised a hand and waved back.

When I got to his room the following day, he was in a foul mood.

'What's wrong?' I asked, sitting opposite him.

'They took my ball,' he muttered darkly.

'Your tennis ball?'

'No, one of my testicles,' he snapped sarcastically, and I couldn't help it; I laughed.

'Why'd they take it?' I asked.

'Some dumb business guy was in here earlier and I bounced it off his head. It was an accident,' he stressed, when he saw my raised eyebrows. 'But they wouldn't believe me.'

'That sucks,' I said sympathetically.

'Yeah. Were you watching?' he asked changing the subject. 'Yesterday?'

'I was.'

'I waved at you.'

'I know. I waved back.'

His eyes met mine and I couldn't read the expression in them but it made me feel weird. There was a beat of silence as neither of us looked away.

'Can I ask you a favour?'

I eyed him warily. 'You can ask,' I conceded.

'You're out of here in like a month, right?'

'Yeah.'

'I was wondering if you'd go check on my family. You don't have to say anything to them, or go anywhere near them, or tell them about me. And I don't think they'll let you back in here once your internship is up, so I'm not expecting you to tell me what they're up to. I just...' He sighed, biting his lip and looking at the ground. 'It makes me feel... It makes me feel like I have a connection to them, if I can send something out of here and it gets to them. You know? Even if it's just you. Even if it's just a person who looked at me and then looked at them with the same eyes. You know?'

I gazed at him, nodding slowly. 'I'll probably get in heaps of trouble,' I said slowly. 'But yeah, okay. I doubt they can do anything too permanent to me.'

Riley looked up at me and I knew he was surprised; he hadn't expected me to say yes. 'Really?!' he asked, beaming. 'You really will?!'

'Yeah,' I lied. 'I really will.'

I obviously couldn't. They'd throw my ass in prison for life and nobody would believe for a second that I hadn't been intending to tell his family all about him; that he wasn't dead; that he was being kept in an underground government dungeon. But it couldn't hurt to give him some hope, cheer him up, make him feel like he had that connection to them that he clearly was desperate for.

'Thanks,' he said, smiling genuinely at me, his eyes watering slightly.

'Don't mention it,' I said. 'Seriously. Don't mention it to anyone.'

He grinned. 'Scout's honour. Hey, you said I could ask you science questions, right?'

I nodded.

'What's zerotonin?'

'You mean serotonin?'

He shrugged. 'Don't think so. I saw it written down. It had a Z. I know what serotonin is; I'm not a moron.'

I shook my head. 'I don't know. I can find out for you, though.'

'Okay.'

'Where did you see it written?'

'That business monkey had it in a file. Something to do with the vaccine they want to test on me. And they do want to test it on me, by the way, you were wrong. So I don't even know why I'm asking you science questions, you're clearly not as smart as you think you are.'

I took a breath to correct him, but stopped myself. If they were testing a cure on him but telling him it was a vaccine then I didn't want to be the one who got his hopes up in case it didn't work.

'You caught me,' I said instead. 'I'm a total fraud.'

He grinned at me. 'Your secret's safe with me,' he promised.

'I appreciate that.'

'Hey, so you're like, totally gay, right?'

I started, surprised. 'What makes you think that?' I asked carefully.

He snorted. 'You literally told me about a date you went on,' he reminded me. 'The meteor shower? With your "friend'?'

'You caught me again,' I said dryly.

'Are you still with him?' he asked.

I narrowed my eyes at him playfully. 'Are you flirting with me?' I asked sarcastically.

'No,' he muttered, looking down at the ground. 'I've just never been on a date and don't rush to correct me here or anything but I doubt I ever will. I'm just asking.'

'I'm not still with him,' I said. 'You don't really have a lot of time for dating when you're competing against four hundred thousand other students for a chance to sit across from your bratty ass for three months.'

Riley looked up at me, laughing. 'Hey, shut up,' he said. 'This is the most exciting thing that will ever happen to you.'

'Maybe,' I conceded.

'Anyway, you're lucky. I have nothing but time. I will literally be a virgin forever.'

'That's pretty pathetic,' I agreed sympathetically, and he made a face at me.

A familiar hissing sounded behind me and I stood up.

'That's my cue,' I said. 'See you tomorrow.'

'I know I keep saying this,' Dr Laurent said, shaking his head as we returned to the main floor of the building in the elevator, 'but it really is remarkable how much of a rapport you've managed to build with him in such a short time.'

I shrugged. 'What can I say. I'm personable.'

He laughed. 'I think he might have a little crush on you.'

I looked up at him, my heart racing for some reason. 'Is that... Possible?'

'Anything's possible,' he said cryptically. 'Now, let's get some lunch and then go back to my office. I have couple of hours free and I'd like to hear your thoughts on the files you read yesterday.'

This time my heart started racing for an entirely different reason and I nodded, trying to appear calm. The fact that I hadn't gotten in trouble yet for stealing the extra file meant I probably wasn't going to, but I could almost feel how heavy it was in my satchel, secreted away in a separate pocket to the rest of them.

We spent the afternoon discussing the early stages of the vaccine development, which parts were outright failures and which seemed promising, and though he couldn't tell me one way or the other how close or far from the mark I was, the fact that he was smiling and not jumping in with many corrections or leading questions led me to believe that I was on the right track.

As I was leaving his office he handed me back the small silver key, telling me to return the files on my way out and bring the key back tomorrow. I left the reading room feeling decidedly lighter, having disencumbered myself of the Operation Remedium file and picked up a couple of books on brain chemistry to see if I could find any mentions of zerotonin.

When I got back to the dorms that night the others were sitting around in the central area reading and studying and talking together.

'You look chipper,' Kristen observed dryly. 'More scintillating conversation with Patient Zero?'

'Yeah, he made a particularly funny dick joke today,' I told them, and they laughed. Whenever they asked about Riley I tended to tell them things that reinforced the idea that he was just a bratty teenager; partly because I didn't want them become jealous or resentful of the fact that I got to talk to him and they didn't, partly because, for whatever reason, I didn't want them to be frightened of him, and partly because it was true. 'What are you guys up to?'

'Ugh. Another boring lab report,' Chris muttered, rolling his eyes. 'You get all the luck.'

I waved my brain chemistry textbooks at him pointedly. 'Yeah, all of it,' I said dryly, setting them down, then hesitating. 'Anybody feel like hitting the gym?' I chanced; there was a basic workout room on our floor that some of the soldiers used and which we had clearance for as well. 'I'm kinda antsy.'

They glanced at each other, and Felix and Renee both shrugged and started to get up. 'I could go for a half hour on a treadmill,' Renee admitted. 'I haven't gotten any exercise since I got here.'

'I brought you something,' I said to Riley the next day, grinning.

He looked back at me warily, but I could see a spark of curiosity in his eyes. 'What?'

I reached into my satchel and picked out the tennis ball I'd swiped from the gym, and his eyes lit up. 'Open palm,' I warned him, and he rolled his eyes but did as I instructed, laying the back of his hand flat on the table so I could drop the tennis ball into it. I was relatively sure he wasn't going to try and kill me but it would still have been stupid to give him the chance to grab my wrist and pull me across the table; he'd have shattered my skull in a second flat.

'Are you gonna get in trouble for this?' he asked, bouncing it experimentally on the table a couple of times. I'd already run it by Dr Laurent and he'd laughed, thinking it was a great idea. He'd taken to dropping me off at the tank and leaving for half an hour before coming to collect me, figuring I was comfortable enough with Riley to be here alone by now.

'Nah. Well, maybe. I stole it from the gym last night. If anybody asks I'll tell them to come see you about it.'

His grin broadened further. 'Thanks, Thomas,' he said, and I smiled. 'So, did you find out anything about zerotonin?'

I shook my head. 'Nothing. Zilch. I'm starting to think maybe it was a code name for something else. Does the guy who had it come to see you often, will you get another chance to look at it?'

Riley shrugged one shoulder. 'Couple times a month. He works for a pharmaceutical company. There aren't many people who are too busy to pass up an audience with me but he's one of them.'

I looked up at him sharply. 'Is his name Walker?'

Riley nodded. 'That's the one. You know him?'

'I've only met him once,' I murmured, the cogs in my brain starting to turn. What the hell was going on here?

'I don't like him. He calls me "it". "Thing". "The patient". Even the doctors call me Zero, like a nickname.'

'He didn't really make the best impression on me either,' I admitted distractedly, stuck in my head while my eyes watched, almost transfixed, as Riley rolled the tennis ball back and forth across the table between his hands, holding them as far apart as the chains would allow. I shook my self and snapped out of it, grinning. 'You wanna play?' I asked.

He looked surprised. 'Play what?'

'Catch, I guess. Get on the floor,' I instructed him, standing up and going to the far side of the room, sitting with my back leaning against the wall. Riley did what he was told, scooting as far in the other direction as the restraints would let him. I held my hands up and he grinned, bouncing the ball once off the floor in my direction. I caught it and bounced it back. 'Can I ask you something?'

'Sure.'

'What do they do to you down here? Like... Do they make you take anything? Or inject you with anything?'

He shrugged. 'They can't inject me with anything. Short of coating a bullet in it, it wouldn't break my skin. And I don't think they give me anything unless they're hiding it in my food, but you know...' he trailed off and tapped one finger against his nose. 'I smell good.'

I grinned. 'Funny.'

'But they're going to,' he added quietly.

I nodded. 'That's what I figured.'

'Thomas, why are they testing a vaccine on me?'

'I don't know.'

'Do you think...' He caught the ball and held it, rolling it around between his palms and staring at it. 'Do you think it could hurt me?'

'I don't know,' I repeated. 'They don't let me see any of the recent development files. I've been studying some of the earlier stuff though, and there isn't anything in there that could harm you.' I paused. 'I mean, I don't think so anyway. I've got a pretty intimate knowledge of your biochemistry, but you're a new breed, dude. There are always going to be variables.'

Riley nodded, still looking down. 'I just hope it doesn't hurt,' he said quietly. 'I always made sure it never hurt, you know, when I... I made it quick.'

I nodded, trying not to outwardly blanch at his reference to the people he'd killed and eaten.

He took a deep breath and let it out, clearly trying to shake off whatever negative place his mind had gone to, and lifted his head, smiling and tossing the ball back to me. We played for a few more minutes before Dr Laurent came to fetch me.

'How is he today?' he asked, once we were inside the elevator.

'Seems fine to me,' I said, wondering why I was lying. I knew it was dangerous to feel like I needed to keep his confidence, like our friendship was anything more than a tool the facility wanted to use to control him, but... He was getting to me. I was having to forcibly stop myself every night from letting my mind wander to how it might be if the cure actually worked. 'What's on the schedule for the rest of the day?' I asked now, changing the subject.

'I have some work to do in the lab but perhaps you'd prefer to study there than in the reading room?'

I nodded. 'Sure. That place is starting to give me cabin fever.'

Dr Laurent laughed. 'I suspected as much.'

We sat in companionable silence in his glassed-off section of the lab for a couple of hours while I tried to focus on what he wanted me to read but couldn't stop my mind wandering to Operation Remedium, Fleming Pharmaceuticals, and what in the hell zerotonin could be.

We both looked up from our reveries at the sound of a knock on the door; my heart jumped when I saw it was Thompson with Mr Walker waiting impatiently at the other side of the glass.

'Ah,' Dr Laurent said, frowning in confusion. 'You'll have to excuse me for a moment, Perkins.'

I nodded, watching carefully as he left the room, closing the door behind him and dismissing Thompson before ushering Mr Walker out of the lab.

Once the door to the main lab had closed behind them, I looked around quickly, keeping my head lowered. Thompson had disappeared and though there were a dozen other scientists and technicians working quietly at their stations, nobody was paying much attention to me and I knew that it wouldn't be especially suspicious to them if they did see me moving around in here. It was well known at this point that Dr Laurent had taken me on as his own personal intern.

My heart thumping hard in my chest, I slipped out from behind my desk and hurried around to lean over Dr Laurent's computer. It was password protected and I knew better than to try and guess - he wasn't careless enough to use a name, date, or even a word; it would be a completely random series of characters and he likely changed it once a week. Instead I crouched down behind his desk and tried the handle of one of the drawers; it was locked. So was the second. And the third.

Shaking my head at my stupidity for having thought I'd be able to get any answers this way, I stood again, about to return to my seat before he came back and realised I'd been snooping. I felt my heart stop for a second when I saw both Dr Laurent and Mr Walker stepping back into the main lab and, with a burst of nervous adrenaline, threw myself under the desk in a panic.

Obviously, this was a fucking stupid thing to have done. What was I going to do? Just wait under here until Dr Laurent left for the day, hope he didn't notice, hope he didn't wonder where I'd gone, hope I didn't get locked in overnight? It wasn't like I could say I'd lost a goddamn earring.

Cursing myself for my idiocy, I froze and stayed as still as I could, barely daring to breathe as the glass door of the room opened and I heard them both step inside. Under the stainless steel of the desk I could see their shoes moving around the room.

'Where's Perkins?' I heard Walker ask, surprised that he'd remembered my name while simultaneously cringing; my absence was the first thing they'd noticed.

'He's probably just gone to the bathroom or something,' Dr Laurent told him impatiently. 'As with last time, and the time before that, and every other time - this room is secure.'

Walker muttered something I didn't catch and they both moved around to the other side of the desk. I flattened myself against side and tried to take up as little space as possible.

'How are things progressing between him and the patient?' Walker asked, like it was an afterthought.

'Well,' Dr Laurent told him distractedly; he was leaning over his desk but not sitting down, and I could hear the clacking of his keyboard as he did something with his computer. 'They have a rapport. Zero trusts him.'

'Good,' Walker said, and I felt my stomach clench. What did it matter to him whether or not Riley trusted me?

'Here we are,' Dr Laurent went on, clearly having found what he was looking for on his desktop. 'As you can see, we've re-adjusted the zerotonin levels just slightly. That should make up for the extra brain swelling but we'll have to re-test it on the mice just to be sure.'

'How long will that take?'

'On the record or off?'

'Off.'

'No more than a couple of weeks. I would prefer to wait longer but...'

'PZUltra has a deadline, Laurent,' Walker told him, sounding impatient now as well. 'One that you've already pushed twice. Be ready to start testing on the patient in two weeks or I'll report you for inefficiency and delaying tactics.'

'There's no reason to threaten me, sir,' Dr Laurent snapped. 'I've told you I'll have it done in two weeks; it will be done in two weeks.'

They reached an impasse, neither saying anything, and even though I was a lot more concerned with the fact that I was hiding under the desk eavesdropping on things I clearly wasn't supposed to know anything about, I could still feel the tension in the room.

'I have to meet with Williams,' Walker said eventually. There was some shuffling and I peeked out from under the desk to see Dr Laurent looking at his watch.

'Thompson is on break,' he muttered. 'I'll have to escort you.'

By which miracle I suddenly found myself alone in the room again and, wasting no time, crawled out from under the desk and hurried shakily back to my seat. Through the glass I could see the doctor and Walker moving wordlessly through the lab towards Dr Williams' office at the far end, and I took a few moments to focus on my breathing and make sure I didn't look as guilty as I felt for when he returned.

Laying in my bed wide awake that night, I tried to slot all of the pieces of the puzzle together in my mind, and the picture I was coming up with was not a pleasant one. It was based on very little evidence and a lot of speculation but there was something in my gut that told me I was right, and if I was, I didn't know what to do with it. I felt suddenly very out of my depth, treading ice cold water and unable to breathe. I was really starting to regret that the closest friend I'd made since I got here was Riley - I could really have done with running this past some of the others but I didn't know them or trust them well enough to do so.

When I turned up to his room the next day I'd had very little sleep and I knew he could tell I was distracted.

'What's up with you?' he asked. 'You're in a way worse mood than yesterday.'

'Sorry,' I told him, taking a breath and trying to rally for his sake.

'We can talk about it, if you want,' he muttered, not meeting my eyes. It was kind of heartbreaking how hard he was trying to be a good friend.

'I just didn't get much sleep,' I told him honestly.

'Why not?'

'Worrying about your dumb ass,' I told him, grinning. 'You feeling any better today?'

He shrugged one shoulder, clearly surprised at how easily I'd turned it around on him. 'Thomas, can I ask you something?'

'Sure,' I said carefully.

'Do you think if, like, it wasn't like this... And if I wasn't, you know, infected. If we were both normal. Do you think we'd be friends?'

'Hm,' I said thoughtfully, taking a second. 'I'm not sure. It would depend. In this scenario, if you're not infected, then is somebody else Patient Zero, or is nobody infected?'

He shrugged again. 'Hadn't thought that far.'

'Well, I mean, I spent most of my formative years being affected by you, and everything that happened as a result, and my dad. It played a huge part in who I am now. So if none of it had ever happened, I'm not sure what kind of person I'd be and whether I'd be friends with somebody like you. But if I were to meet you on street tomorrow, as you are now, but human?'

He nodded.

I smiled. 'Yeah, I think so.'

Riley bit his lip and nodded, looking down. This answer seemed to make him sadder rather than happier and I felt a pulse of concern in my stomach.

'Not what you wanted to hear?' I asked gently, and again, he shrugged.

And that's when I did it. Out of all the stupid things I'd done since I arrived, I chose that moment to do the stupidest one of all.

I leaned across the table and put my hand on his forearm to try and comfort him.

As soon as my fingers touched his skin I was jolted out of whatever alternate reality my brain had gone to to think that had been a good idea; his skin was rough and cold and undead and I looked up at the same time as he did, meeting his eyes, which looked shocked and horrified and panicked. My stomach clenched as electricity shot down my arm and then it was over; he wrenched away from me violently, his chair falling to one side and he to the other, ending up on the floor on his hands and knees.

I opened and closed my mouth in shock, trying to say something but unable to.

'Oh, god,' he muttered pushing himself up and sitting on his haunches. 'Oh, god, oh, god.' He turned around and I saw one of the manacles on his wrists had snapped in half; the other was hanging on by a hair. 'You shouldn't have done that,' he muttered, staring down at his wrists and then looking up at me, still panicked. 'You really shouldn't have done that.'

Fear and horror settled heavy in my stomach and I took one shaky step back from him; a split second later a siren split the air and we both turned to stare as the door at the opposite end of his room slid open and half a dozen armed soldiers spilled inside, pointing their assault rifles directly at Riley.

'No!' I shouted, pushing myself out from behind the desk and throwing myself in front of him. 'No, it was an accident, it was my fault! He didn't do anything,' I tried to yell at them but they weren't listening to me and I was keenly aware that the only thing stopping Riley from driving his fingers through my skull and grabbing a handful of my brain were the chains still attached to his ankles and his own self-control.

'Move aside!' one of the soldiers shouted at me. 'Don't make us shoot you too.'

'Nobody has to shoot anybody!' I shouted back. 'This was a mistake, it was an accident, it was my fault,' I repeated. 'You don't have to shoot him, he's fine, he's not-'

I broke off as I heard the the crunching of metal behind me and turned around in shock to see Riley had torn off the chain around his right ankle.

'What are you doing?!' I shouted at him. 'Stop, you're going to get yourself-'

'Last warning, intern!' the soldier shouted at me, and I turned back to look at them, frozen in place, unable to move. 'Fire!' the soldier shouted and I squeezed my eyes shut, having no desire to witness my own death, but it never came.

When I squinted through one eye a second later Riley had shot past me and thrown himself at the guards; two were already out cold on the floor with chunks of flesh missing, scattered beside their bodies; and he was on top of a third while the others pointed their rifles but seemed unsure about what to do with them. In the chaos, Riley somehow managed to hunt them out of the room and then slammed the door closed; he threw his weight against it bodily and putt his full strength into ensuring it wasn't opened again from that side.

There was a beat of calm silence in the room as his eyes met mine for a second; he slid to the floor with his back against the door and grabbed at the ankle of one of the soldiers on the ground. With one movement he dragged the man towards him and I didn't have time to look away before he put a hand on either side of his head and twisted; with a sickening crunch his skull separated from his spine and Riley sat with the crown on the head balancing on his knees, pushing his fingers up through the inside of the man's neck and scooping out bits of flesh, discarding them before finding the meat he was looking for. He took a handful of the man's brain and shoved it roughly into his mouth, barely pausing to chew before swallowing and scooping out another ball of matter.

I tripped backwards away from him, trying not to make any sudden movements but feeling a primal instinct to get as far away from him as possible.

He was making guttural noises of satisfaction and he pushed more of the brain into his mouth, blood and little bits of flesh dripping down over his chin. When he was finished, he wiped the back of his hand over he face a couple of times, smearing the blood.

'Oh, god,' he said again, but it was different this time. He took a couple of deep breaths and stood up, walking across the room; I flinched but he moved right past me, raising a fist to slam against the glass window.

It cracked.

He hit it again and it shattered; I covered my face and head as glass rained down around me and by the time I looked up again he was hoisting himself through the space where it had been and looking left and right down either side of the hall.

Acting purely on instinct, I followed him carefully and quietly in time to see him doing the same thing to the window of the room next to his. Up and down the hall he quickly shattered the tanks and the forms of the infected appeared, crawling through the broken glass to freedom.

One of them spotted me and I backed away, feeling the wall of the corridor on my back and dropping to the floor, knowing I couldn't get away and needing to make myself as small as possible.

She lunged towards me and I flinched away but before she could reach me Riley was there; he pushed her out of the way and pointed her towards his room, where two more guards lay unconscious and possibly dead on the floor. She climbed inside and he turned his attention to me, stepping towards me and holding out a hand.

I stared up at him and I know I looked horrified and terrified as I shook my head.

'I'm not going to hurt you,' he said, pushing his hand further towards me.

And like a fucking idiot, I lifted my hand, hesitated, held his gaze for a second, and then slid my fingers into his.

He hauled me to my feet and pulled me along with him, heading towards the door at the end of the corridor.

'This is a really bad idea,' I told him, half talking to myself. 'There are a lot of soldiers out there, we're going to get shot, they're going to kill us.'

Either he didn't hear me or wasn't listening to me, because when we reached the door, which usually requires both a badge and an iris scan, he dug his fingers into the reinforced steel, making ten grooves, and pulled. The door opened with what seemed like very little effort from him. His strength had increased by orders of magnitude just because of what he'd eaten.

'Do you know the way out?' he demanded, looking back at me.

I nodded.

'Don't trick me,' he said.

I hesitated again, meeting his eyes, and shook my head.

Still holding my hand, he pulled me through the door and we were met with every single soldier who worked on the underground level pointing their assault rifles squarely at us. I wondered briefly why they didn't just start shooting but figured they were under orders from might higher up to try and take Riley... Undead.

Tugging on my hand, he pulled me around so I was standing in front of him with my back pressed against his chest.

'Are you serious?' I hissed. 'If get shot, I die,' I reminded him. Riley wouldn't survive a bullet to the head but he would barely even feel getting shot anywhere else.

'They're not going to shoot you,' he muttered back.

'Yes they are!' I hissed, feeling the sights of almost three hundreds weapons aiming squarely at my chest.

'No they're not,' he insisted, as the dozen other infected bodies he'd freed poured through the door behind us and suddenly... Chaos.

I mean, I'd thought it was chaos before. But it wasn't. Not like this.

They immediately dived towards the soldiers, biting and tearing and smashing and cracking; somebody started firing and then everybody was, hitting the walls, the ceiling, the floors, and each other but managing to not pierce a single infected skull.

'Which way?' Riley shouted at me over the noise, but I was way too overstimulated at this point and had my eyes squeezed tight shut, trying to block my ears with the one free hand I had and my arm. 'Which way?' he shouted again, closer to my head, and I pointed in the direction of the elevator without opening my eyes or standing up straight.

Riley threw his arms over my head and guided me through the mess and away from it; miraculously, I could hear the noise lessen behind us as he let me go to rip open three more security doors before we reached the elevator.

'It's going to be even worse up there,' I warned him as he threw us both inside and mashed the buttons with his fist. It didn't go anywhere; the doors didn't even close. 'You need a badge,' I pointed out.

'Do you have one?'

I pulled it out of my pocket. 'There's no way it-'

I broke off as he grabbed it and scanned it; the doors slid shut and he shot me a triumphant grin before hitting the buttons again. 'Have a little faith,' he instructed me.

I shook my head. 'This isn't happening,' I mumbled. 'There's no way this is happening, I'm dreaming this.'

'Do you dream about me often?' Riley asked as we ascended slowly.

I couldn't answer; I just stared at him wordlessly, feeling pale and sick.

'You look more like a zombie than I do,' he told me as the elevator came to a stop I held my breath, preparing to be obliterated by gunfire as soon as the doors opened.

Despite the fact that Riley had adequately proved that he could escape a situation where guns were being trained on him but not shooting, we once again emerged to see a wall of weaponry pointed straight at us.

Riley pulled me in front of him again, holding me like a hostage.

'Zero,' a voice said calmly, and we saw Dr Laurent standing behind an armed soldier.

Riley gazed at him impassively. 'That's not my name,' he said flatly.

'Why don't you let Thomas go and we can talk about this?' Dr Laurent suggested.

'Why don't you come out from behind that guard-dog and we can talk about this?' Riley countered. 'At least mine doesn't have a gun.'

There was a palpable hesitation but then, clearly against anybody's better judgement, Dr Laurent stepped out from behind the soldier and took a few steps towards us.

'We don't want to hurt you, Zero,' he said in the same calm, measured voice. 'We don't want to kill you. You're important to us, you know that.' He was trying to play up to Riley's ego, but I knew that wasn't going to work. 'Why don't you tell us what's wrong? What do you want? We can get you a bigger room. Do you want a television?'

Riley was shaking his head in something akin to disbelief. 'A television?' he asked. 'Are you serious?'

'Zero, I know you're angry and frightened, and that's our fault. We should have been more up front with you. We've been working on a cure. We're almost there. We're only a couple of weeks away.'

If this meant anything to Riley he didn't let it show on the outside, just looked Dr Laurent up and down dispassionately.

'Thomas,' the doctor said carefully, not taking his eyes off of Riley's face. 'Tell him. Thomas knows all about it, Zero.'

Riley turned his gaze on me expectantly, but I couldn't react. I couldn't say or do anything. I suppose he took my silence as confusion, because he seemed to decide Dr Laurent was lying and, still not letting go of me, started moving slowly closer to the edge of the semi-circular armed cage of bodies that had been constructed around us. I had an idea that I knew what he was doing and I was right; the soldier he had his eyes trained on started shaking the closer we got, clearly having never expected to be in a situation like this, wanting to shoot but knowing he couldn't without being given the order.

Shoving me roughly behind him, Riley let go of me and reached for the soldier's head, but he didn't remove it; instead he pulled the riot helmet from his body and stuffed his own head inside it. Bullet proof body; now bullet proof head as well.

'I'll take yours, too,' he said flatly to the next soldier in line; shakily, the man removed his helmet and handed it to Riley; Riley handed it to me. 'There,' he said. 'Now we're almost even.' I knew what was coming next; for humans, guns were the weapons; for Riley, it was brains.

He leapt on one of the helmet-less soldiers and together they crashed to the ground; he crouched over him with his head between his hands, smashing it against the floor like a squirrel trying to open a nut. There was a lot of noise and shouting and - somebody was trying to bark the order to fire but Dr Laurent was authoritatively countering the order - as Riley scooped bits of brain matter embedded with shards of skull from the ground and pressed them into his mouth.

'Now we're even,' he announced darkly, getting back to his feet. The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds and I peered up at him through the glass front of the helmet he'd given me. 'Who wants to take the first shot?'

The silence of the hallway echoed as nothing happened, everybody waiting for somebody else to make a decision or do something.

'Zero-' Dr Laurent tried again.

'That's not,' Riley said, fury rolling off his body in waves, 'my name.' He took a step towards Dr Laurent and I knew he wouldn't do the man any favours; I jumped to my feet and got between them, facing Riley and putting my hands on his chest to restrain him. I didn't think the helmet would stop him from ripping my head off but I was starting to believe he didn't intend to hurt me.

'Don't,' I whispered.

Riley searched my face impassively for a minute before reaching out to grab me and pull me in front of his hostage-style again. He pushed me towards the soldiers; I stumbled as I tried to get him to stop but couldn't, opting instead to close my eyes again and not even opening them in surprise when I felt us push past the line of defence without a single shot being fired.

Nobody tried to stop us - there wouldn't have been any point - until an authoritative voice barked, 'Hold them!' and, with obvious reluctance, the soldiers nearest us tired to pile on Riley; letting go of me again he dispatched them without breaking a sweat, shoving them off and tossing them aside like the were made of water vapour. I heard bones cracking and flesh tearing and voices screaming but it did no good; Riley had decided he was getting out of IH299, and so Riley was getting out of IH299.

As soon as we rounded the corner he pushed me from behind and we both broke into a sprint; he could run a lot faster than me and I could tell it was irritating him to have to slow his pace but there wasn't much either of us could do about that. He didn't know the way out without me.

Silently I led us down hallways and through corridors, past the labs where frightened eyes peered at us through the reinforced glass, past the reading room, and past the final security station which was all but abandoned as we'd left the majority of the armed guards with broken limbs and flesh wounds in a pile by the elevator; he wrenched open security doors with ease - now that he'd eaten that much brain in so little time his strength was at full capacity.

We broke through the main door of the biotech building and Riley stopped, standing still, looking up and around, breathing deeply. I remembered he hadn't been outside in over three years but didn't really think now was the right time to stop and appreciate it. He squinted up towards the sun, covering his eyes with his hands, and turned to me, smiling.

'Now what?' I asked. 'There'll be another army here in seconds.' Before I'd even finished my sentence we heard the sounds of armoured vehicles in the distance; I knew it wouldn't be long before snipers on the buildings started shooting and even though my head was protected, the rest of me was still woefully susceptible to bullets.

Riley seemed to think about it for a second - seemingly in no rush whatsoever - before holding out his hand to me and waiting.

I looked up at him, swallowed, and did another newly characteristic stupid thing: I put my hand in his again and he smiled, pulled me towards him, and started leading me away from the front of the building, his urgency returning now as we stuck to the wall and kept low, running around the side of it and towards the back.

I put my trust in him and tried not to pay too much attention to what was happening or where he was taking me; instead I focused on the fact that I had just gone from being a hostage to being an accomplice and wondering what my sentence would be when we were caught. Death, probably.

We reached the end of the building, which covered several city blocks, and Riley peered around the corner. We were near the perimeter fence, on the other side of which were the woods I'd driven through to get here. Not for the first time that day, I had an idea I knew what he was thinking.

'Okay,' he said, dropping down to crouch on the ground against the wall and look at me. I followed suit. 'We're gonna have to make a run for it. That fence is electrified but that doesn't really make any different for me. I'll tear it open but you'll have to be careful going through not to touch it because if you do I think it'll fry you.'

I nodded, though I was pretty sure I was going to get fried one way or another eventually.

'Okay. Ready?'

I nodded again.

'Stay behind me and stay low and follow my footsteps,' he instructed me, before throwing himself out from behind the wall and sprinting towards the fence. As soon as he became visible that sniper fire I'd been worried about started and he weaved this way and that to avoid being hit. I knew this was for my benefit; it wouldn't hurt him to get shot anywhere other than his head, which was still safely ensconced under the helmet.

Taking a deep breath and feeling certain I wouldn't make it far enough to worry about not touching the electrified fence, I jumped up and followed him, trying not to waver when bullets pinged and cracked off the asphalt near my feet.

I looked up to see Riley grabbing too fistfuls of the fencing and tearing it like tissue paper, then turning around to beckon me with one hand. He jumped through the fence and held a fold of it back for me to throw myself through; miraculously I made it without getting shot or fried.

'Come on,' he shouted, disappearing into the trees, and once again I followed, trying to keep at least one eye on the back of his head as I tripped over debris on the forest floor and the muscles of my legs started to burn with exertion.

We ran. And ran. And ran. For what felt like forever. My lungs were on fire in my chest and I gasped for breath; sweat rolled over my face and into my eyes and down my back.

'Riley,' I choked eventually, my voice raspy, completely unable to take another step. I collapsed onto the ground in a heap, ripping off the helmet and gulping lungfuls of air and wishing I had some water.

'Are you okay?' he asked, coming to stand over me, unstrained.

'If you have to go, go,' I rasped at him. 'I can't.'

'No, that's okay. We've been running for hours. I think we can take a break.' He settled on the ground beside me, cross-legged, and pulled his tennis ball out of his pocket, bouncing it off a tree and catching it again a few times.

'What happened back there?' I asked after a couple of minutes, when I was starting to feel normal again.

Riley glanced at me. 'Like... All of it?'

I shook my head. 'Why... How did you break those chains when I touched you?'

He shrugged one shoulder. 'Dunno. Just did.'

'And what's your plan, exactly?'

He shrugged again. 'Dunno,' he repeated, before laying himself on the flat of his back, gazing up through the trees at the sky. 'But whatever happens, it was worth it.'

I looked down at him as he continued to stare upwards; the sun was setting and it was getting cooler and pinks, purples, and oranges of the sky were giving way to dark navy blues and a smattering of stars.

Moving slowly so as not to attract his attention, I slipped my hand into my pocket and closed my fist around the taser Dr Laurent had given me. Taking a careful breath, I pulled my hand out of my pocket and jabbed the thing into Riley's neck, pressing the button to shoot 50,000 volts of electricity into his bulletproof flesh.

He sat up, scowling at me. 'Ow,' he snapped, rubbing his hand over the side of his throat. 'What was that for?'

'Taking me hostage,' I supplied. 'Using me as a human shield. Running me half to death.'

'You volunteered for that last one,' he said accusingly. 'I gave you the option, remember?'

'Don't remind me,' I muttered. 'They're gonna execute me for this for sure.'

Riley made a face. 'We're not getting caught. And as far as anyone else knows you are just a hostage. Relax.'

'Right. Because when you ran ahead to rip open the perimeter fence, a normal hostage definitely wouldn't have just stayed where he was.'

Riley shrugged. 'So you have Stockholm syndrome.'

'Maybe I do,' I muttered. 'Look, you need to come up with a plan here. We can't just live in the woods for the rest of our lives. Or eternity, in your case. They'll find us for sure.'

'I have a plan,' Riley said decidedly. Then, 'Or, at least, I have an outcome. I'm going to see my family.'

'Right,' I said, trying not to lose my cool or panic. 'Except, they definitely will have thought of that and I can guarantee you that your family are already in protective custody.'

'No, they're not,' Riley said confidently. 'Because they couldn't do that without telling them why, and that I'm not dead, and that they've been keeping me locked up for three years. They're probably being watched, but they're not being held.'

'Okay,' I conceded. 'But even so, that's really dangerous.'

'I don't care. I have to see them. Just for a couple of minutes.'

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. 'And then what?'

He shrugged. 'Steal a car, drive south, keep going. I can pass for human, sort of. As long as I keep my head down.'

'And stop shattering people's skulls to get at their brains,' I muttered.

Riley bit his lip and stayed silent for a few moments. 'I'm sorry if I scared you,' he said eventually.

I didn't say anything; I couldn't. Instead, I pushed myself to lay down on my back a few feet away from him, looking up at the now inky-black sky. 'Which way to your parents?' I asked eventually.

He lay back down as well. 'North.'

I nodded. 'How far?'

'Three or four days. I know a place we can crash for a few days while we're there, as well.' He took a breath. 'What are you... How long are you planning on sticking with me?'

'How long are you willing to have me?'

'Indefinite.'

'Then let's just see how it goes.'

I fell asleep shortly after, waking the following morning shortly after sunrise, feeling pleasantly surprised that I was both still alive and not in custody.

'Morning,' Riley said; he was sitting up and bouncing his ball off the tree again; I noticed at some point in the night he'd draped his jacket over me. 'You were shivering,' he informed me as I handed it back.

'Thanks.'

'You ready to go?'

My stomach rumbled noisily and Riley smirked. 'What?' I asked. 'You ate more recently than me, remember?'

'Yeah, I know. Sorry. We can't go to a store or anything but I'll be able to smell if anything is poisonous.' He lifted his arms as if to indicate that the entire woods were at my disposal for consumption.

'Are you serious?'

He shrugged. 'Yeah. There's got to be some fruit around here somewhere, right? Or like some tasty fungus or something.'

'You're fucking with me,' I accused him, and he laughed.

'Yeah. I scouted around a bit while you were asleep; there's a motorway a few miles that way and I found a filling station. We can follow it north until we get to my family, there'll be shops along the way.'

I shook my head, scowling at him. 'Not funny,' I muttered.

'It was a little bit funny.'

We gathered our things and I followed him towards the motorway; he tossed his tennis ball into the air and caught it, seemingly much more relaxed and moving a pretty leisurely pace today. I realised that the energy boost he'd gotten from his feast the previous day would be wearing off; he no longer felt the primal need to run.

I could hear the sounds of cars on the motorway in the distance as we followed it's direction; after a couple of hours Riley veered sharply to the left and, a little while after that, dropped to the forest floor on his tummy and pointed. I joined him and followed his gaze; we were on an incline overlooking the road and, just beneath us, I could see filling station he'd mentioned before.

'I'll wait here,' he told me, rolling onto his back and continuing to toss the tennis ball in the air, catching it each time just before it landed on his face.

Taking a steadying breath and reminding myself that it was unlikely that any media outlets were circulating my picture, I stumbled and struggled down the incline and jumped the last few feet to the ground, straightening myself and hoping I didn't look or smell too much like I'd just spent the night in the woods. I didn't have any money and I still hurt all over from all the exertion of the previous day. I wasn't sure I had the energy to run like hell if I was caught shoplifting and it would be easier to avoid detection if I didn't look homeless.

A bell tinkled over the door as I pushed it open and the bored-looking teenager sitting behind the register didn't even look up as I made my way down along one of the aisles, looking for easily concealed packets of cereal, chocolate bars, and nonperishables.

As quickly and quietly as I could, I started scooping armfuls of protein bars into the large front pocket of my hoodie, then flipped the hood up over my head and left the store rapidly. I knew I looked like someone who'd been shoplifting but I couldn't help it, and anyway I didn't think the cashier cared too much about missing merchandise.

'You look so shady,' Riley told me as I struggled back up the incline and eventually collapsed beside him at the top of it.

'Shut up,' I snapped, pulling a protein bar out of my pocket and unwrapping it, then devouring it.

'Gross,' Riley muttered, and I stared at him.

'Are you seriously judging my food choice?' I asked him thickly around a mouthful of oats, and he held up his hands innocently.

We continued on for most of the rest of the day, stopping here and there so I could take break and eat more, eventually settling in a clearing near to edge of the incline, the sounds of the cars inexplicably comforting.

'So what about your mom?' Riley asked, as we sat ten feet apart on opposite sides of the clearing, tossing the tennis ball back and forth.

'What about her?'

'Do you wanna go check up on her before we head south?'

I sat quietly for a few moments before smiling slightly and saying, 'My mom was so proud when she found out I got selected for this thing.' I caught the tennis ball and held on to it for a second before throwing it back. 'I was pretty reluctant to come, because it was for three months, and I wouldn't be allowed to leave if anything happened. And she was sick. And a month before I left, they told her... Three months.'

Riley had been about to toss the ball back but he stopped, staring at me, dropping his hand to his side.

'I don't know if it's happened yet. We're not allowed any news from outside, or from home. I wasn't going to know until I got back. But... We already said goodbye. I don't need to check.'

He continued to stare at me for a few seconds, before lifting his hand and tossing me the ball. 'I'm really sorry,' he said.

'Not your fault,' I told him, smiling.

'Not like with your dad,' he agreed. 'That one's all on me.'

'Pick which parent you love most,' I suggested. 'I'll kill the other one.'

He made a face at me. 'People act like I invented the fucking virus,' he muttered. 'Or that I went out of my way to get it and infect other people. I was just like your dad, you know. I was just walking home from school one day and a fucking mosquito decided to snack on me. I didn't ask for this.'

'I was kidding, Riley,' I said gently. 'I know you didn't. And my dad was bitten by a mosquito as well; it wasn't your fault.'

'Try telling that to almost anyone. They hear "Patient Zero" and they just think I started everything. I was just the first person on this side of an imaginary line in the sand to have to misfortune to encounter a dumb insect.'

'Hey, relax,' I said carefully; the memory of what Riley could do when he was riled up was still fresh in my mind. 'They're not here. It's just me. And I'm saying it's not your fault.'

Riley looked at me through the gloom of the darkening forest and I saw his shoulders relax, his demeanour soften, his whole countenance change. I realised he'd probably been carrying a lot of guilt around for a long time, a lot of frustration that he felt like he was being mischaracterised by the title Patient Zero. It occurred to me that nobody had ever told him anything like that before.

I smiled reassuringly and tossed him the ball; he caught it but didn't throw it back.

'You're a good friend,' he mumbled after a minute.

I blinked at him. 'You too.'

'You wanna know what my utopia would be?' he asked after a minute.

'Sure.'

'There should be some sort of agreement. Like we won't hurt anybody, and we'll take care of the ones that do, as long as we're kept fed. Just give us the brains of people who've already died. It could even be an opt-in system. People donate their corpses to medical science every day. They could donate their brains to us.'

I nodded. 'You know why it wouldn't work though.'

'Because people are scared of us.'

'Yeah. And the memories thing.'

Riley rolled his eyes. 'Yeah, it's way better that I rot in an underground prison for literally ever because humans are so protective of their precious memories.'

'It's not just that,' I told him reasonably. 'Come on. People... Masturbate. They look in the mirror naked. They watch porn. Nobody wants you knowing all of their embarrassing shit, they don't want you looking at it through their eyes. The ugly fat guy doesn't want you to know how much time he spent staring at the hot girl at the office. The hot girl at the office doesn't want you seeing her shave her pubic hair. Or that she once had a sex dream about her brother. He brother doesn't want you to know that even though he's straight he fooled around with a guy once and liked it.'

'Yeah, yeah,' Riley muttered dejectedly. 'I get that. I just don't think it's a good enough reason to imprison me.'

'I don't either,' I assured him. 'I'm just saying.' I paused, watching him as he rolled the tennis ball between his palms for a few moments, lost in thought.

'Can I have your brain?' he asked.

I stared at him. 'This is getting weird,' I said. 'You promised not to hurt me,' I reminded him as an afterthought.

He scowled at me. 'I mean, eventually. When you die. Of natural causes.'

'Oh.' I thought about it for a second and then lifted the thumb and forefinger of both of my hands, making a square and squinting at him through it. 'You wanna see yourself through my eyes, huh?'

'Yeah.'

'Hm. Okay. I suppose you can have it then. But only if I die of natural causes.'

'What if you get shot?'

'You can have it as long as you're not the one who kills me,' I amended.

He grinned and tossed me the ball; I tossed it back and after another half hour of this I fell asleep.

When I woke I noticed he'd laid his jacket over me again, and when I sat up to hand it back to him he was looking at me warily.

'What?' I asked, guarded.

'You're not going to like it.'

'What?' I repeated.

'I gotta eat, dude.'

I blanched, and asked for the third time, 'What?'

'I gotta eat. It's been days. My body is gonna start attacking itself soon. We gotta get to a morgue.'

'Um. Are you fucking kidding?'

'Look, I don't want to scare you but in about three hours I won't be in control of this anymore; the only other brain here is yours and you can't run fast enough to get away from me.'

'How the fuck am I supposed to get you to a morgue in three hours? We're in the middle of fucking nowhere.'

'There's a hospital around here somewhere. It's where IH299 get all the other organs they feed us with.'

'Gross,' I muttered, but got to my feet, indicating I would go with him. 'Are you gonna be able to sniff it out?'

He nodded. 'I think so. Just... Stay downwind of me.'

'Dude,' I muttered.

It only took him an hour or so to find the hospital; it wasn't that far off the motorway and for once the fact that Riley looks a bit like a corpse worked in our favour; as long as he kept his hood up and didn't make eye contact with anyone he just looked like another sick person.

Trying not to focus on how insane and dangerous this was, I followed him into the hospital, also keeping my head down, following the signs for the morgue as they led us downstairs and hoping we wouldn't get stopped by anybody asking what we were doing down there because somewhere inside I knew Riley would kill them rather than get caught.

'Here we are,' he muttered as we came to a stop outside a pair of double doors with the word "Morgue" printed across the top of them.

'What are you gonna do about the mortician?' I asked worriedly.

'I reckon I'll just knock him out,' he decided. 'It's cleaner.'

'Please try not to kill him.'

'If I was in the mood for killing would I really have bothered coming all the way down here?' he demanded, and I shrugged; he had a point.

Taking a breath, I followed him through the double doors and watched as he snuck up on the lone doctor in the room as he sat at his desk, his back to us, and grabbed him by the back of the head. He slammed him face first into his desk and took a step back; the guy had a broken nose and was out cold, but clearly still breathing.

'Satisfied?' Riley whispered sarcastically at me. He made his way over to the metal drawers I recognised from movies and cop shows, pulling a few open to reveal sewn-up and tagged corpses. There was an elderly man; a woman in her mid twenties; and middle-aged biker-looking dude, and a little girl who looked to be around seven. 'Eeny,' he said, pointing at the first body. 'Meeny,' he pointed at the second. 'Miny,' the third. 'Mo.' He stopped over the little girl's body and before I could do anything or protest he'd dug his fingers into her skull and cracked it in two.

'Oh my god,' I mumbled, horrified and looking away as he began to scoop out handfuls of her brain.

I pressed my back against the side of the mortician's desk and slid to the floor, facing away from Riley and jumping when I felt him join me a second later. He still had a lump of her brain in one hand and was picking at it with the other, eating it bit by bit.

'I can't believe you just did that,' I said weakly.

'Did what?' he asked. 'This? Why did you think we were coming here? I told you I needed to eat. Did you think I was after kidneys or something?'

'No,' I mumbled. 'Fucking hell Riley, she's just a little girl.'

'Was,' he corrected me. 'She was already dead. Leukaemia, by the way,' he added.

'Still,' I mumbled. 'Why not the older guy, or the biker? I feel like you picked her just to mess with me.'

Riley made a face. 'I picked her because of what you said yesterday. She's seven. How embarrassing can her memories possibly be?'

I turned to look at him, trying to argue, but finding I couldn't. His morality was, in a twisted way, sound.

'She liked Phineas and Ferb and her favourite food was spaghetti and she had a dog called Sprinkles,' he said. 'She was a happy kid.'

He shoved the rest of the matter into his mouth and chewed quickly before swallowing.

'And she just saved your life. Come on.'

He made to leave but I pulled him by the back of his jacket and grabbed a couple of paper towels from a dispenser by the guy's desk; his face and hands were covered in blood.

'Right. Better close those drawers too.'

Twenty minutes later we'd made it out of the hospital unmolested and I followed him in a subdued silence back into the woods and back on track.

'Are you really upset with me about the girl?' he asked after a while.

I shrugged. 'It was just kind of brutal to see,' I admitted. 'But I get it. I think you did the right thing.' I paused. 'I'm sorry I got upset with you.'

Riley snorted. 'Yeah. You're the bad guy,' he said sarcastically.

We walked through the woods until sunset and made another little camp; Riley gave his jacket without waiting for me to fall asleep this time and I smiled gratefully, drawing it up over my shoulder and I settled in.

When I woke the following morning and gave it back he was chipper; in a few hours we'd be outside the town his family lived in and he'd get to see them, even if it was only from far away, even it was only for a couple of minutes, even if it meant we got caught.

'I'll tell them I forced you,' he assured me when we were only a couple of miles outside his hometown. 'I'll tell them I took you hostage and kept you hostage the whole time. I'll say you tried to escape even, but I stopped you.'

'I'm not sure any of that will do much good,' I said dryly. 'Nobody's going to believe you kept me out here for two days and didn't eat me.'

'They might,' he hedged. 'Dr Laurent thinks I'm into you. And everybody knows you visited me all the time; I'll tell them that I see you as a kind of pet or something. Like a puppy. And that's why I fed you and didn't kill you.'

'I worry about you as a pet owner,' I muttered, rolling my eyes, and he grinned.

'Look,' he said levelly. 'I'm not planning on getting caught. I'm pretty confident I can get away with this with minimum fuss. I just don't want you to be worried about what will happen if we do. I'll take the fall.'

'I know,' I said, smiling. 'Thanks.'

'Because I'm a good friend,' he went on.

'Yes.'

We continued in silence for a few moments until Riley took a breath and spoke again. 'I lied to you,' he said.

I looked over at him. 'When?'

'When you asked what happened back in my room. Why I broke the chains when you touched me.'

'Oh.' I hesitated. 'So, what happened then?'

'Well,' he started. 'You touched me. And... I don't get touched a lot. Not in a nice way. Not like that. And it felt weird. People aren't supposed to touch me because, you know, I can kill them, but also because it makes me really hungry. Like... I can feel your pulse. And all the little electrical signals your brain is sending. I can feel it. And I want it. But... I really didn't want to hurt you. More than I wanted to eat you.'

I nodded slowly. My heart was racing and I knew he could tell, that he could sense it, but again I was determined to keep as calm as possible on the outside.

'Does that frighten you?' he asked quietly.

'A little.' A lot more of me found it weirdly... Hot. But I wasn't about to tell him that.

He stopped moving suddenly and I looked over at him again; his eyes locked with mine and he raised one finger to his lips warningly. I stopped moving, stopped breathing, willed my heart to stop beating.

I couldn't hear anything but I knew Riley could and suddenly he had slammed one hand over my mouth and nose, pushing me backwards and throwing us both down; we rolled over a bank and into some greenery, concealing our bodies. He had landed on top of me and did his best to cover me completely; he didn't smell like anything any dogs could pick up but I sure as hell did and if they had sniffers with them our best bet was for his body to obscure my scent.

He kept his hand over my mouth and nose, the other resting beside my head on the ground, and gazed down at me; my heart was already racing but it picked up again as, like usual, I found it impossible to break eye contact.

Then I heard it. There were footsteps, at least three people, and a couple of dogs. One of them started barking.

'They've been here,' a voice muttered quietly. 'Laurent was right; he's going to his family.'

'How long ago do you think they passed?'

'Who knows? Could be minutes. Could be hours.'

One of them made a noise of impatience. 'We should have put trackers in the interns as well.'

'If Zero disabled his own, he would have disabled the intern's too.'

'How did he even know it was there? How did he do it?'

'The intern could have told him. The only way is with some sort of electromagnetic pulse; if he'd ripped it out we would have been able to track it to wherever he left it.'

On top of me, Riley lifted the hand by my head and touched the side of his throat where I'd tased him lightly with his fingertips, still holding my gaze. Then he moved his hand and touched my throat in the same place, in the same way. Again, my heart rate picked up, and his fingers brushed lightly over the pulse under my jaw.

'We need to get back,' one of the voices was saying, and I heard the sounds of them beginning to move away.

I gazed up at Riley nervously; he moved the hand over the bottom half of my face just slightly, eyebrows raised, questioning, and I nodded. Slowly, he pulled it all the way back and rested it on the other side of my head, not moving from on top of me. My heart was racing and I could barely breathe; his eyes were searching my face and I felt my stomach clench as he lowered his head, slowly, painfully slowly, before his eyes fluttered closed and so did mine and then he was kissing me.

His lips brushed mine and I kissed him back, feeling terrified and electrified and amplified.

I exhaled sharply when he pulled away, opening my eyes to stare up at him.

'Hey,' he whispered softly.

'Hey,' I whispered back. We continued to lay there and just look at each other, neither having any idea of what to say or do. Eventually I shot him a lopsided smile and asked, 'How badly do you want to eat me right now?'

His eyes searched my face again and he said hoarsely, 'You have no idea.'

And, again, worryingly, it was hotter than it was frightening.

'Come on,' he murmured, crawling off me to stand and offering his hand to pull me up too. I took it and let him tug at me, feeling weak-kneed and stumbling against him slightly as he did so. He righted me before starting to climb back up to where we'd been walking.

'They know we're here,' I reminded him, cringing slightly when my voice came out throaty. I cleared it and started again. 'We have to be careful.'

'I know, genius,' he muttered. 'Come on. I grew up in these woods; I know my way around much better than they do. We'll be fine.' He turned to look at me. 'Do you trust me?'

I paused, then nodded dumbly.

'Then let's go.'

I followed him silently through the trees, trying and failing not to overanalyse what had happened. The fact that he wasn't talking to me made me anxious; what if it had been a mistake?'

'Okay,' he said eventually. 'Here's the part you're not going to like.'

I looked at him sharply. 'What do you mean?'

'We have to go into town.'

'No,' I said immediately. 'That's a terrible idea.'

'It isn't,' he countered.

'It is. They'll spot you straight away.'

'I know. I don't really mind about that. They're not going to shoot me in the street. They're not going to draw any more attention to me than absolutely necessary. Nobody who lives here knows how close IH299 is - can you imagine the outrage if people found out that not only are the government housing zombies this close to civilisation, but they let one escape?'

'That's all really interesting speculation Riley, but there are a hundred different ways they could shoot you in the head and make it look like something else.'

'Not if we stick to areas with lots of people. Look,' he said, losing patience. 'You can wait here for me if you like. Or you can come with me. Either way, I'm going.'

I didn't really have much to say to that and just looked on as he pulled his hood low over his eyes and started to climb down the steep incline on our right towards town.

Cursing myself and him, I followed suit.

'We'll be in and out in fifteen minutes,' he promised me when I caught up with him, not in the least surprised that I'd opted to follow him.

'Where does your family live?' I asked.

'At the other side of town. But it's four-thirty on a Wednesday; they'll all be in the store right now.'

Riley's hometown was a generic mountainside town; it was cold and clear and surrounded by coniferous trees, and the streets all climbed at a sharp incline. There were a dozen people within ten feet of us at any given time and Riley kept his head lowered, lest anyone see his sunken purple eyes, his pale skin.

'They've seen us,' he said quietly to me without looking up; I fought the urge to look around nervously.

'Don't make any sudden moves,' I warned him. 'If they think you're going to actually approach your family they will shoot us.'

'Thanks, Captain Obvious,' Riley muttered. He steered us down another main street, a busier one, and stopped halfway down, turning to look across the intersection. I followed his gaze through a bookstore window, where a middle-aged man standing on a ladder stocking shelves and a teenage girl sat behind the cash register, reading.

'Is that...?' I asked softly, and he nodded.

After a moment, a door behind the girl opened and a middle-aged woman appeared; she touched the girl on the shoulder and said something, and all three of them laughed.

I felt a dull ache in my stomach for Riley.

'Look,' I said gently. 'Behind your mom.'

On the wall over the woman's left shoulder were two picture frames; one of the whole family, Riley included, and, next to it, a photo of just him.

I glanced at him but from where I stood I couldn't see his face under the hood; I noticed his fingers twitching and I knew he wanted to pull it down, cross the street, just go in there, just for a second, just see them, hear their voices, feel their arms.

Instead I reached out and laced my fingers through his; his hand clenched in mine tightly and I worried for a second that he was going to crush the bones in there. He relaxed his grip after a moment and let out a long, slow breath before muttering, 'Okay. Come on.'

'Riley...' I started. 'We can stay for-'

'No we can't,' he interrupted, pulling me back the way we'd come without turning his head.

I didn't say anything else, just walked alongside him silently, until, without any warning, he shoved me roughly to the left and down a narrow side street.

A narrow side street with no people.

For a split second I wondered if he'd become suicidal, but before I could say anything he'd crouched down and ripped a drain covering clean out of the asphalt with his hands.

'Hurry,' he muttered. 'They can't see us but they're coming.'

'Are you ser-?' I started to ask but then gave up, sitting on the edge of the hole in the ground and shimmying down into it, dropping the last five feet to the tunnel underneath. Within seconds he'd joined me, pulling the covering back over the hole as he did so.

'Storm drain,' he assured me. 'Not sewer.'

'Okay,' I said, looking around. It was dark and damp and smelled terrible, but the ground was dry.

'This way.' He set off to the right and I hurried after him, lowering my hood. After a second he did too and when I looked at him I was surprised to see him smirking.

'What's so funny?'

'They are,' he told him, jerking his head upwards. '"Where are they?"' he mimicked in a thick voice. '"I swear I saw them come down here." "Goddammit we lost them."'

'So they haven't-?'

'They'll think of it eventually,' he said. 'But we've got a decent head-start.'

I nodded. 'Right. So. Are you okay?'

He looked down at the ground again and chewed on his lip. 'It was harder than I thought it would be. It's just, I know it has to suck. Not knowing. I know they probably think I'm dead, but... I dunno, I feel like people usually need closure, right? And they'll never have that.'

'They have each other,' I supplied.

'Yeah. And I've got...'

'Me,' I joked. 'You sure got the rough end of the deal.'

He looked over at me and grinned. 'Yeah.'

We made our way through the tunnels for what felt like forever, emerging eventually in the woods at the far side of town.

'Now what?' I asked.

'I said I know a place we can crash for a couple of days,' he reminded me. 'Remember? We're going there.'

It took another couple of hours of wandering what felt like aimlessly through the woods until, finally, Riley stopped and made a noise of triumph.

'I knew I could find it again,' he congratulated himself, as I peered through the gloom and saw a run-down, abandoned cabin, complete with boarded up windows.

'This is so fucking creepy,' I muttered as I followed him towards it. 'This is the creepiest fucking thing. I can't believe I'm at an abandoned cabin in the woods with a fucking zombie, this is so creepy.'

Riley let out a bark of laughter as he pulled the door open and stood back to let me in first.

'Um, no fucking way,' I told him. 'Take all your unnatural hearing and your super strength and make sure it's safe first.'

He grinned at me and rolled his eyes but duly stepped inside ahead of me, looking around and making a big deal of checking around corners and behind doors before deciding the place was empty.

'Unless you're scared of spiders,' he added.

'I am.'

Aside from a lot of dust and some cobwebs the inside of the place was pretty bare and even though it was dark and creepy, it was also dry and a little warmer than it usually was outside at night, so we settled in relative comfort on the floor in the middle of the cabin, rolling the tennis ball back and forth between us like little kids so as not to make too much noise.

'So how do you feel?' I asked quietly. 'Is it better that you saw them?'

Riley nodded. 'Yeah. I mean it hurts, but I'm glad they're okay. I was worried we'd get here and I'd find out that they'd gotten it too, some other way, after I left, and that it was all for nothing. Or that they'd died some other way, or moved out of town, or something. This is the best I could have hoped for, really.'

I nodded. 'Then I'm glad we came. And I'm sorry I tried to stop you.'

Riley flashed a grin at me. 'Your first lesson in how I'm always right.'

I made a face at him. 'Yeah, yeah.'

We were quiet for a couple of moments, rolling the tennis ball back and forth.

'So,' he said eventually. 'Should we talk about the other thing?'

I felt my stomach clench again and looked down, exhaling sharply. 'Probably.'

'Are you okay about it?'

I nodded. 'You?'

'Yeah. But I'm not the one who gets eaten if it goes wrong.'

'That's not what I meant.'

'I know.' He paused, and the only sound in the room for a while was the tennis ball on the floorboards. 'I can't really be the one who makes the decision,' he said, after thinking for a while. 'Because I'm the dangerous one. But I wanna do it again.' I caught him smiling when he heard my heart rate speed up.

'How much danger am I actually in here?' I asked quietly.

He shrugged. 'I can speculate. But there's really only one way to find out.'

I lifted my eyes to look at him. 'I guess we'd better push your limits then,' I suggested, holding his gaze. Riley moved towards me, putting one hand on my shoulder and pushing me backwards onto the floor gently, leaning over me and running his thumb over the pulse on my throat again.

'This,' he murmured. 'This just gets me.' He closed the distance and kissed me again, and it felt about as crazy as it had before, dangerous and exciting. I pushed my lips back up against his, my heart thundering in my chest at how stupid and serious and sexy it was.

I didn't hold back this time; lifting my hands, I wound them into his hair and pulled him closer, arching my body into his and jumping in surprise when he slammed one hand into the floorboards beside my head, steadying himself.

Feeling a weird and inappropriate rush of power that he was having that much trouble controlling himself, I amped it up a notch, deepening the kiss and bending one leg at the knee to press our bodies closer.

That was a mistake.

I wrenched my head back and shoved him on the chest roughly when I felt his teeth scrape over my bottom lip. He opened his eyes, surprised and confused; I wasn't strong enough to actually push him away but he still let me.

I ran my tongue over the inside of my lip in a panic, trying to see if I could taste blood, but my adrenaline was pumping too hard and I couldn't tell.

'What's wrong?' he asked, blinking in confusion.

'What's-?! You bit me!' I exclaimed.

Riley shook his head, frowning at me. 'I did?'

'Yes!' I lifted my hand and folded my bottom lip over with my finger. 'Did you break the skin? Am I bleeding?'

'I can't see from here,' he said, looking at me carefully, meaningfully.

Staying cautious, I moved towards him slowly, settling on my knees in front of him.

'It's not bleeding,' he confirmed quietly.

'Are you sure?'

He nodded.

I took a couple of deep breaths and lowered my self down to sit on my haunches. Riley pulled his knees up in front of him and hugged them to his chest.

'I'm really sorry,' he whispered. 'It wasn't a zombie thing, it was just a boy thing.'

I shook my head guiltily. 'No, it's okay, I overreacted,' I assured him. 'It was my fault, I was trying to... Push your limits,' I finished lamely.

'Shut up,' he snapped at me. 'You sound like everyone who's ever been beaten by their spouse. "It was my fault, I provoked him."'

I closed my mouth, because he was right; I did sound like that.

We sat there at an impasse for a while, not really looking at one another but occasionally catching each other glancing, before eventually Riley sighed and said, 'Do you think... What Dr Laurent said, when we were leaving. About a cure. Do you think he was telling the truth? Maybe we should just... Go back.'

I took a couple of seconds to figure out what I was going to say. 'I don't think there's a cure,' I settled on finally.

'Why not?'

'Well. When I first got there, I overheard Mr Walker - your business monkey, from Fleming Pharmaceuticals - and Dr Williams talking about some new drug they wanted to start testing. They said Dr Laurent was holding things up, being stubborn. And they had a file with the name Operation Remedium. Remedium is Latin for "cure". A few weeks after that, Dr Laurent gave me the key to the filing cabinet that that file was being stored in. So I snooped. And it was mostly redacted but it was definitely about a cure.'

'So?' Riley asked. 'That sounds pretty good.'

'I think I was being tricked,' I told him quietly. 'I think Walker and Dr Williams knew I was eavesdropping. And I think Dr Laurent knew I would look for that file if I was given the chance. I overheard he and Walker talking about zerotonin the day before we left IH299. They definitely didn't know I was there this time. I think it's a new compound and I think they named it after you. They mentioned something called PZUltra. Now, this is a lot of speculation on my part, but that sounds a lot like MKUltra, which was a CIA mind control program from the sixties. And I think PZ stands for Patient Zero in this case. And I think they wanted to use zerotonin to control you. And I think they knew you'd trust me. And I think they thought I'd tell you if I thought there was a cure. And I think they knew you wouldn't take any drugs they gave you unless they told you what it was for. And I think they knew you wouldn't believe them if they told you it was a cure. But that you'd believe me.' I stayed quiet for a few moments while he digested this. 'I think they want to weaponise you,' I said eventually. 'And the others.'

Riley nodded slowly before taking a deep breath and then letting it out, slumping.

'You know when you're like eight or nine and you're kind of starting to think, you know, maybe Santa isn't real, so you talk to your parents about it, and they admit he isn't, but even though you were right and you kind of knew you were right, it's still crushingly disappointing?'

I moved forwards and wrapped my arms around his knees, facing him. 'Don't give up,' I said. 'Just because there isn't a cure now doesn't mean there won't ever be.'

'You're gonna cure me, huh?' he asked, smiling slightly.

'Maybe. I'm pretty good at what I do, you know.'

'I know.'

I lifted one hand to push some of his hair out of his eyes and then let it rest on this side of his face, rubbing my thumb over the apple of his cheek. 'Let's try again,' I suggested softly, pulling him towards me. He looked like he thought it was a bad idea but I didn't give him a chance to argue, leaning forwards to press my lips to his gently. After a couple of seconds I pulled away, smiling. 'There,' I said. 'I'm still alive.'

Riley made a guttural noise of frustration, but I knew he wasn't too annoyed. 'You should get some sleep,' he muttered, shrugging off his jacket to give it to me. I started to ball it up this time, intending to use it as a pillow, but Riley put one hand on my shoulder and pulled me down so I was laying with my head on his stomach.

I knew we were both thinking the same thing when I asked, 'I don't suppose you have any well-kept secret telepathy with other zombies or anything?' and he wasn't even surprised.

'No.'

'So there's no way you can tell whether all the others got out in the end or if they were recaptured?'

'No.'

There was silence as we both ruminated over this for a few minutes.

'We have to go back, don't we?' he asked quietly.

'I think so.'

When I woke the next morning he had one hand playing with my hair and I stretched contentedly, enjoying how it felt. 'I have a plan, sort of,' he said when he noticed I was awake.

'For IH299?' I asked. I was glad one of us did, because I had no idea what we were going to do. I knew it was really fucked up that the government wanted to create mind-controlled zombie soldiers but it also felt like a really bad idea to just try and bust those zombies out of there. Even if we somehow managed to pull it off, we couldn't just... Let them go. The virus would spread all over over again.

'No,' he said. 'I have no idea what to do about that.'

'Oh.'

'I mean, for us, or whatever.'

'Oh.'

'Firstly, we have to keep me fed. I have to eat once every couple of days. Even if it's just other organs. Touching you makes me hungry, but not for your brain in particular. When we're, like, doing stuff, I get a bit carried away, but it's not because I want to eat you. I just want to bite you. I can control that, as long as I've eaten.' I was still laying with the back of my head on his abdomen, looking up at him, and he brought his eyes down to meet mine. 'I won't bite you again, ever,' he said seriously. 'I promise.'

That didn't seem like it would be an easy promise to keep but I nodded. 'I believe you,' I said. 'I can help too. I took it too far last night. I'm not trying to take responsibility,' I added quickly, because he'd taken a breath to argue with me. 'You bit me and that's your fault, I know that. But I escalated and I shouldn't have. I knew I shouldn't even while I was doing it. I won't make that mistake again. From now on we'll just... Talk about it. You know. If we wanna take things up a level.'

Riley looked away, embarrassed but smiling. 'Okay.'

'So,' I said, sitting up and changing the subject. 'We're going back.'

'Yeah.'

'And we need to feed you.'

'Yeah.'

'And we need to come up with a plan. Or at the very least an outcome.'

'Yeah.'

'Okay,' I said, taking a deep breath and nodding. 'Any ideas?'

'Yeah.'

An hour later we were making our way back into town through the storm tunnels. We were at least a day's hike from the hospital Riley had dined at on the way here, and he needed to eat sooner than that.

'There's a funeral home,' he told me lightly. 'It's only a couple blocks away from the bookstore.'

'They'll be watching it,' I warned him. 'They'll know what you did at the hospital and they'll know you're trying to stick to brains that are already dead.'

'I know. I know it's risky. But the other option is riskier.'

I knew he was right so I didn't say anything and let him lead the way through the tunnels until he stopped and looked up and so did I and there was a drain above our heads.

'This comes out on Evergreen Street,' he told me. 'Then it's one block that way,' he pointed, 'and two up. Are you sure you don't want to just wait here?'

I shook my head. 'I can handle it.'

'Okay. Here we go.' Riley couched down slightly before pushing against the ground with the balls of his feet and jumping the two and half meters to the roof of the tunnel, grasping the bars of the drain with both hands and pressing his feet into the ceiling. He pushed against the drain and it came out of its setting easily, sliding it to the side on the street above and poking his head out to make sure it was safe. After a moment, he climbed fully through the hole and then leaned back in at the waist to drop his hand down to me. I grasped it and he pulled me up without a hint of difficulty.

It was a quiet street and though there were people passing at the intersection on the far end, nobody was looking in our direction and we had at least a few moments of grace before anybody from IH299 realised we'd made our way back to town.

'Come on,' Riley muttered, taking my hand and pulling me down the street, flipping his hood up over his head as he went. We turned left, hurrying up the two blocks towards the funeral home, and I turned in surprise when I heard him laughing quietly.

'What?' I demanded.

'Just - imagine if it's not there anymore. Like, I haven't been here in five years. What if it's closed or moved?'

'How it that funny?!'

'I dunno. Just that I didn't think of it until now.'

I wanted to be mad at him but couldn't, and found myself laughing as well, lowering my head and snorting at the ground.

'Lucky break,' he said after a second, and I looked up to see the funeral home was, in fact, still where it was supposed to me. And, as easy as that, we walked through the front door.

It was quiet and smelled weird, like funeral homes always do. Through a pair of opened double doors on the left we could see a casket laying on a white cloth on a table, but the rows of chairs facing it were all empty. A small placard by the door announced that the funeral for Elizabeth Jones would be starting an hour from now.

'No,' I said, before he could even make a move or say anything. 'Don't make her family's day any worse.'

Riley tsked with impatience but started down a corridor on the right instead and I followed him; he pushed through another pair of doors and found the motherload. Three caskets were lined up on separate tables, all closed, but I could tell from the way Riley's nostrils were twitching that all three of them were full.

I stood back while he lifted the cover on the nearest one and peered down into it, then did the same with the remaining two. Then, without further preamble, he reached into one of the coffins and cracked the skull in there like an egg, scooping out handfuls of brain matter and eating them in a way I was starting to recognise. When he was done, he moved over to the second, rinse and repeat.

'Are you gonna be weirded out if I bring one with me?' he asked, looking over at me, not caring at all about the rivulets of blood trickling down over the bottom half of his face.

I thought about it for a second. 'What are you gonna put it in?'

He knelt down and ripped a large square from the corner of the tablecloth, before reaching into the coffin and doing his thing and pulling out a few handfuls of brain, wrapping them up. Immediately blood started to soak through the cloth.

'That'll do, I suppose,' I agreed, nodding.

Riley wiped the back of his hand across his face, smearing the blood. 'Wanna make out?' he asked, grinning, and I made a face. 'Let's get out of here,' he suggested, heading for the door and leading the way back down the corridor to the front room of the funeral home.

Which was where we were greeted by a wall of armed soldiers pointing their assault rifles directly at our heads. We stopped in our tracks, frozen for a second before Riley dropped his package it fell open, bits of brain rolling out of the cloth and onto the floor. He grabbed me and pulled me in front of him again, hiding his head behind mine.

'Let him go, Zero,' Dr Williams' voice said from somewhere behind the cavalry.

'I forced you into all of it,' Riley whispered almost inaudibly. 'I promised not to kill you if you told me what you knew about the cure. You did everything you could to convince me to go back.'

Before I could react he pushed me roughly to the side where I fell heavily against the wall and slid to the floor. Impassively, Riley lifted his hands and put them on the back of his head, dropping to his knees when instructed and not moving or doing much of anything as half of the soldiers kept their sights trained on his head and the other half rushed forwards, wrapping him yards of steel chains, so much that even a freshly fed zombie wouldn't be able to break free.

In the chaos, while nobody was looking at me, I reached out tentatively and grabbed the cloth napkin full of brain, balling it up again and stuffing it into the front pocket of my hoodie.

After that, everything happened very quickly. Riley was dragged out of the funeral home and stuffed unceremoniously into the back of an armoured vehicle; somebody came and hauled me to my feet and escorted me to a different one. When I got inside, I saw Dr Williams and Dr Laurent were already in there, and I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the leaking napkin full of brain tissue damp against the skin of my stomach.

'Thomas,' Dr Laurent exclaimed, leaning forward to put a hand on my arm and grasp it tightly. 'We're so relieved you're alright.'

'Thanks,' I mumbled. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to behave or what I was supposed to say and do, but somewhere in my mind I knew I could get away with just seeming shellshocked for a while longer.

'Let's get you back to IH299,' Dr Williams said, motioning to the driver of the vehicle to get going. 'You'll have to shower and eat something and then we can have our medical team look over you.'

I knew what this meant; ostensible concern for my wellbeing was actually to have somebody look over me very carefully, in much the same way as my mom had done with my dad, to make sure Riley hadn't bitten me.

Riley.

They weren't going to let me see him again. I was going to have to come up with a plan all by myself, and all I had was some secret knowledge about a mind control drug and Riley's lunch.

I went through the motions once we got back to IH299 several hours later; showering and eating and going where I was told, trying really hard to make sure nobody took my hoodie with the napkin full of brains in it away.

'Where have they taken Patient Zero?' I hedged asking, once I was sitting alone in a room with Dr Williams.

'Dr Laurent is with him now,' he said, not really answering my question.

'What's going to happen to him?'

'He'll be penalised for what he's done.'

I hesitated. I had to try and keep track of the different levels of deception in my mind: they knew I "knew" about the "cure" but didn't know I knew it wasn't really a cure. 'Does that mean you're not going to cure him?'

Dr Williams looked at me carefully.

'What do you know about a cure?'

I shrugged. 'I know what Remedium means.'

'Ah. Yes. Well, that was careless of me. Zero's case is under review. The government may very well decide he's not worth curing, considering how much money and effort he's cost them over the past few days. In that event, he'll be neutralised.' I tried not to flinch; I knew what neutralised meant in this context.

I also knew that if Dr Williams wanted me to think that Riley was going to die, it probably meant he wasn't.

'What happened after... After he took me?' I asked. 'There were others...Others got out too.'

'Most are dead,' Dr Williams admitted. We recaptured a few. And we're still looking for a few.'

I looked at him carefully while making sure it didn't look like I was looking at him carefully. I had no reason to trust him but I was pretty sure he was telling the truth. In any case, if they were running low on zombies, it only reinforced my belief that they would keep Riley around.

'Now,' Dr Williams said, having let me run through my questions so I could focus more clearly on answering his. 'We need to know exactly what happened. What did you tell him about the cure?'

I shrugged again. 'Just that I was pretty sure there was one. He asked me about zerotonin, I told him I'd never heard of it but it was probably a neurotransmitter developed from serotonin. And I explained about how that could tie into a cure.'

Dr Williams was nodding; he seemed pleased with my lies.

'Am I going to get in trouble for looking at that file?" I asked, even though I'd done exactly what they'd wanted me to do when I read it.

'I think we can overlook it, considering everything that's happened,' Dr Williams said magnanimously. 'Why don't you go back to your room and get some sleep? We'll pick this up again tomorrow.'

I was escorted back to the dormitory building by three armed guards this time, and I knew there was one stationed outside the dorm at all times as well. As soon as I closed the main door behind me, the doors to the sectioned off rooms all opened at once and the other interns spilled out, staring at me curiously with eyes full of questions, none of them actually managing to find their voices.

'Are you okay?' Renee blurted eventually, taking a step towards me.

I nodded. I was exhausted and part of me wanted to fall into bed, but more of me was wound up too tight with anxiety about what they could be doing to Riley.

'What happened?' Felix asked. They all moved forwards to settle on the couches and armchairs of the central common area and after a moment, I did too.

'He just wanted to see his family,' I told them honestly. 'We were on the way back here when they picked us up.' I didn't see any reason to tell them that we'd been planning on releasing all the other zombies and escaping south.

'How in the hell did you manage to not get eaten?' Kristen breathed, eyes wide.

'He wanted me to tell him about some stuff I learned since I've been here. We made a deal. He wouldn't kill me or anyone else, and I'd tell him whatever he wanted to know.'

'I was outside when they drove him in,' Renee confided quietly. 'They made us all stay back because he'd just eaten before they got him. They pulled him out of the back of the truck and started dragging him into the Security building. I've never seen so many chains in my life. It was terrifying; he was struggling like crazy.'

I flinched, trying not to think about whether he was scared or hurt. At least I knew where he was now.

'How did he eat if he'd promised not to kill anyone?' Chris asked, frowning at me.

'We hit up a morgue and a funeral home,' I muttered.

'You know, I've always sort of thought, in a perfect world, dead people could just... Donate their brains to the Infected,' Renee mused. 'As long as they kept their population small, and there was a zero-tolerance policy for biting or killing humans, it could work.'

'That's what Riley thinks too,' I blurted before I could stop myself.

The others looked at me weirdly and I hunched my shoulders, trying to look as damaged as possible so they could explain away my weird behaviour.

'Anyway,' Renee went on casually, seemingly deciding I was still just in shock. 'They've obviously taken you off his case. Now I have to work with him.'

I looked up sharply. 'What?' I demanded.

She shrugged. 'They're gonna put him back in the tank under the Virology building and starve him out for a few weeks, not feed him anything. First he'll go fucking crazy, and then he'll just... Stop. Like shooting a human up with morphine. Except it'll be pretty painful for him. Then I get to go in and do pretty much whatever I want with him. He'll be my zombie, then,' she finished, grinning.

'He's not your-' I started to snap before I caught myself, but it was too late; Renee leaned forward in her seat, snapping her fingers and pointing at me.

'I knew it!' she hissed. 'You fucking idiot. You've gone and fallen in love with him, haven't you?'

I shook my head. 'You're insane,' I told her. 'He kidnapped me, held me hostage, and almost got me shot a thousand times over.'

But she was shaking her head as well. 'You've been falling in love with him for weeks - hasn't he?' she asked, turning to the others for support.

There were head tilts and shrugs of agreement all round.

'Of course they're not letting me in to see him,' Renee went on, scoffing. 'They're not going to let any interns in to see any zombies ever again.'

'Are they doing the other stuff?' I asked, swallowing my pride; there was no point in arguing with her.

She bit her lip. 'Yeah. My advisor told me today.' She paused while I looked down at my hands in my lap and tried not to panic. 'What are you gonna do?'

'Do?' I asked cautiously. 'Nothing, of course.'

'Liar,' Felix said accusingly.

'We've been talking about it,' Renee said. 'And we're in, whatever it is.'

I narrowed my eyes at them. 'You can see why I'd have a hard time trusting you on that,' I said cagily.

'I know about PZUltra,' Chris supplied, and I whipped around to look at him.

'How?' I demanded.

'Computer science minor,' he shrugged. 'I got curious. Did some hacking. There's a lot of crossover between the Biotech people and Immunology.'

'Is zerotonin what I think it is?' I demanded, leaning forward.

'If you think it's a neurotransmitter that works with the virus in the zombie brain to control their minds, then yes.'

I slumped back in my chair, feeling the air leave my lungs with his confirmation. 'None of this means I can trust you,' I warned you. 'I've been manipulated by my advisors since I got here and most of what I know I found out by accident and speculation. There's no way I can believe that this isn't just another trick.'

The others glanced at one another.

'Look,' Renee said. 'You don't really need to trust us. There's no way you're going to be able to get Riley back on your own; with us you have a chance. If you do it by yourself, you end up arrested and maybe executed. If we're tricking you, you end up arrested and maybe executed. If we're not tricking you...' she trailed off, letting me fill in the blanks for myself.

'But,' Kristen piped up. 'We do have a way of maybe showing you that we're for real.'

'We've kind of been hiding something in your room,' Chris said, looking guilty.

'After security tore it apart the first time and didn't find anything about where Riley might be taking you, we figured it was probably the safest place in IH299.'

'They're very reasonable once you start talking to them,' Kristen added.

I pulled back, looking at her like she was crazy. 'They?' I asked. 'Are you saying what I think you're saying?'

Shrugging, Felix stood up and went to open the door of my room. I could see through it from here and sure enough, sitting on the bed, reading a couple of my textbooks, two zombies looked up in surprise.

'Oh my god,' I muttered. I didn't recognise either of them; one was a girl who looked to have been in her mid-twenties when she'd been infected, and the other was an older guy, maybe late fifties. They looked drawn and unwell and I wondered what they'd been eating for the past week.

'We've been feeding them animal organs,' Renee piped up, reading my mind. 'It makes them really sick, but it keeps them from going crazy.'

I stood up and walked over to the door of my room, reaching my hand into my hoodie pocket carefully. There were about four fistfuls of brain in there and I took out one, dividing it in half and offering them one each.

They both looked up at me carefully, clearly thinking they were being tricked, but the desperation for sustenance won out and they each grabbed at the matter greedily, stuffing it into their mouths before I changed my mind.

'Oh my god, Thomas,' Chris muttered, horrified. 'Why they fuck are you carrying around a pocketful of brains?'

'If I don't keep snacks around my boyfriend might eat me,' I muttered back. 'Okay,' I said more authoritatively, turning around but pressing against the wall of my room; I wasn't about to leave my back exposed to two zombies I didn't know. 'We have the beginnings to a plan here, I think.'

'There's one more thing,' Renee piped up. 'They've got him in a heavy duty cell under the Security building right now. They want to wait twenty-four hours until he's a bit weaker before transporting him to the tank in Virology with all the others. So they'll be moving him tomorrow afternoon.'

I nodded slowly, understanding her meaning. 'Then we've got less than twenty-four hours.'

The following morning I was collected from the dorms and escorted back to Dr Williams' office for further questioning. I hadn't gotten any sleep because what the fuck, how am I supposed to sleep when there are two zombies in my bed, neither one of which was the one I was apparently in love with? But my restlessness and exhaustion were to be expected considering what I'd "gone through" and nobody seemed in any way suspicious.

I spent a few hours answering questions about what Riley had said and done while we'd been in the woods, fudging some details and plain fabricating others, making a point of keeping all of my lies in order in my head so I wouldn't mess up and contradict myself.

As the hands on the clock over Dr Williams' head began to inch past midday I didn't even have to feign weariness in order to get excused for a break; considering how little I'd slept, how wound up with anxiety I was about Riley, and how tense I was about what we were planning to do that day, I knew I looked almost zombie-like myself. I was permitted to return to my room for an hour to rest before I was expected back to continue my questioning.

The dorm was empty when I returned; the others were expected to carry out their daily tasks as usual and were all in their respective areas of the campus, though by now they should all be making their way to join Renee in the Virology building. However, Maria and Julian were still patiently in my room, waiting for me.

Maria dispatched the guard outside the dorm with ease; he had his back to the door and nobody expects a surprise zombie attack from behind. Groaning with satisfaction, she devoured his brain before she and Julian beckoned me to follow them down the hallway in the opposite direction to the one I usually take; they were sneaking me out through the fire escape in the back where Renee and the others had snuck them in in the first place. Chris had assured me that he'd disabled the fire alarm.

We kept low, hugging the wall, as we made our way along the backside of the dormitory building and around the Pathology labs towards the Security building. There was a half hour left before Riley's scheduled transportation and already the area around the Security building was swarming with soldiers, all dressed in riot gear and armed to the teeth even though he would be much weaker and more pliant by now.

We dropped to our haunches and waited; whether or not I trusted the other interns to not be players or tools in a manipulation being carried out on me, I was pretty sure that the zombies were genuine in their intentions - they didn't want to be recaptured and they definitely didn't want to be weaponised for use by a government that had been effectively torturing them for three years.

We didn't have to wait long. Almost exactly thirty minutes after we'd hunkered down around the corner of the Pathology labs the main doors of the Security building opened and Riley was dragged out; they had him chained securely on a platform that was being wheeled by more soldiers in riot gear; over a hundred others on the ground and stationed on the roofs of the surrounding buildings had their assault rifles aimed as his head.

I flinched and I heard Maria and Julian growling quietly beside me; it was almost as if the spectacle was partly to humiliate him.

I glanced at the time; Renee and the others should be turning up within a few minutes and I needed to make my move.

I stood, followed by Maria and Julian, and stepped around the corner of the labs, walking carefully towards the front of the Security building. Nobody on the ground, or stationed on the roofs, were looking in our direction, but it didn't take long for Riley's eyes to meet mine.

Everything froze for a split second and he smiled slightly, but then his forehead furrowed in confusion when he saw who was flanking me. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a handful of the now-dry brain matter I'd been carrying around for more than a day.

'Hey,' I called to him, narrowing my eyes and judging the distance. 'Catch.'

Everybody on the ground turned to look from him to me as I tossed the tennis ball-sized lump through the air directly into his cupped hands. Staring down at it incredulously, he wasted no more than a second before bringing it to his mouth with some difficulty, the chains holding him rattling noisily.

Everything was frozen; I knew I was at serious risk of being shot but nobody was going to do anything until somebody gave an order and nobody had prepared a contingency for me losing my mind.

Just as it seemed like I was running out of time to not get shot a new chaos erupted; Renee, Chris, Felix, and Kristen came around the corner at a run - followed by no fewer than fifty Infected.

Suddenly there was a lot of shooting going on all at once but most of it was aimed in the direction the others had come from and I saw them diving out of the way as the zombies threw themselves into the fray. Maria and Julian dived in front of me, clearing a path of broken-boned and flesh-torn soldiers so I could get to Riley with rest of his lunch and we could try to figure out a way to free him.

As we got closer I grabbed another handful of the the brain in my pocket and pulled it out, ready to give it to him, but that ended up being a mistake.

Julian, hungrier than Maria considering she hadn't shared the guard outside the dorm, grabbed my wrist as I raised it and pulled to his face, trying to snatch the matter with his teeth. Even half-starved he was a lot stronger than me and although I tried to pull away it made little difference other than to annoy him. He turned his gaze on me I saw his eyes had changed; he was hungry and at some point in the two minutes between when we'd been behind the Pathology labs and now he'd lost control.

Even though we were surrounded by potential targets, he was locked into me now and he pounced, pushing me to the ground and landing on top of me heavily, reaching again for the brain in my fist. I let him have it, hoping he'd regain control quickly enough to realise what he was doing and let me go but it didn't happen; after he'd swallowed he leaned in close to me and sniffed, moving lower towards my pocket.

I knew once he'd finished with the easily accessible grey matter he'd move on to the one in my skull, and I turned my head frantically, looking for Maria, but she was gone.

Instead I made eye contact with Riley and, as usual, that was it, I was done, I couldn't look away.

He was struggling more violently than I'd ever seen him before against the chains that held him and I watched, transfixed, as one of them snapped.

That was all it took. Within seconds the others all fell away and he leapt down from the platform into the chaos, pushing his way viciously through the bodies to get to me.

And then, when he was less than five feet away, I felt it.

A bite.

Julian's teeth sank into my forearm, breaking the skin, and I felt blood start to seep, hot and wet, over my arm.

Less than a second later Riley had tackled him and thrown him off, ripping his head clean off his shoulders and smashing it into the ground before materialising over me, looking horrified.

'No,' I said in a panic. 'No, no, no.'

Riley picked up my arm and looked at it helplessly, shaking his head.

'No,' I said again weakly.

'I've got you,' he told me, moving around behind my head and putting his arms under my shoulders, lifting me and dragging me without difficulty out of the centre of the chaos and away. He set me down when we'd disappeared behind the Pathology labs again and I dropped to sit, leaning against the wall, cradling my injured arm to my chest with the other. 'Maybe it won't...' he started to say hopefully but trailed off; it was useless, it was too late, there was no way I hadn't been infected. 'What do you want me to do?' he asked instead.

I stared up at him, wide-eyed, and swallowed. 'Bite me,' I said hoarsely.

He shook his head in confusion. 'What?'

'Bite me. I don't want it to be him, I want it to be you.'

I saw realisation dawning in his eyes and even though we both knew I was already infected, I wanted to be able to hold on to the minuscule hope that it hadn't been by some random zombie I'd made the mistake of standing too close to in a riot. He nodded, swallowing as well, and pushed his hand onto the side of my throat and into my hair, holding eye contact with me as he leaned in slowly and kissed me.

Despite everything that was going on; the rebellion happening just around the corner; the fact that I was bleeding heavily and in considerable pain; I inhaled sharply and kissed him back - I'd spent more than a day worrying that I'd never get to do it again and I squeezed my eyes tight closed, pulling him closer in desperation.

After a second I felt it; his teeth sank into my bottom lip, gently at first, then harder, breaking the skin. The metal taste of blood filled my mouth as he pulled away and I felt a drop of it run over my chin.

'You look like me,' he joked weakly, reaching in to wipe it away with his thumb.

'I love you,' I said flatly, looking up at him.

'Yeah,' he said, meeting my eyes. 'I know. I love you too. Come on, we need to get you out of here.'

He hauled me back up again and I slung my undamaged arm around his shoulders as we hobbled towards the perimeter fence; he closed one arm around my waist and held tightly, more or less carrying me without subjecting me to the indignity of being lifted up. When we reached it he tore another hole and held it open for me to stumble through, and, again, we disappeared into the woods.

'How are you feeling?' he asked quietly after a few minutes.

'Scared,' I admitted.

'It's not so bad. It doesn't hurt very much. It will be over by morning.'

'We have to get back to that clearing,' I told him. 'Where we slept the first night.'

'Why?'

'That's where the others are meeting us.'

'You had it all planned out, huh?'

'Didn't really account for this,' I muttered.

We'd run for hours on that first day before stopping, and it took a lot longer this time considering my retarded pace and the fact that with every step I felt sicker.

'How did you pull this off?' Riley asked, and I wasn't sure if he really wanted to know or if he was just trying to distract me.

'Turns out all the interns believe in your utopia,' I told him, laughing weakly. 'And they weren't super into PZUltra.'

'How did they get everyone out of the Virology tank?'

'Almost all of the soldiers at IH299 were assigned to your two-and-a-half minute journey from Security to Virology. Skeleton staff everywhere else. So Renee used her credentials to get down to the tank and once they were all out...' I trailed off; he'd already witnessed and been a vital part of one zombie rebellion, I didn't exactly need to go into details.

'What about those two that were with you?'

'Julian and Maria. You let them out when we busted out of the Biotech building. They never got caught because the interns were hiding them in my room.'

'Julian,' Riley muttered. 'So it's my fault he was even in a position to bite you in the first place.'

'Don't do that. That's some Patient Zero bullshit. You being the first to get the virus in Canada didn't lead to everyone else who got it getting it, and you breaking one window in Biotech tank didn't lead to me getting it.'

'Okay,' he mumbled.

It was starting to get dark by the time we finally reached the familiar clearing; the riot helmets we'd stolen from the guards were still sitting beside each other under the tree Riley had been bouncing his tennis ball off.

'How do you feel?' he asked, setting me down with my back against the toughened wood of a trunk.

'Shitty,' I said. 'Like I've got the flu.'

'Virus gonna virus,' he muttered, sitting next to me.

'Hey,' I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the napkin. 'You want the rest of this?'

He looked at it for a second but shook his head. 'Best save it for you,' he decided, and I flinched.

'Gross,' I muttered. 'Ew.'

He laughed. 'Give it a couple of hours and that'll be the most appetising thing you've ever seen.'

A few hours after sunset Riley sat up straight suddenly, straining to hear whatever it was he could hear, and I tensed, hoping it was the others and not the cavalry, because there was no way hell I could move right now. I was sweating and drifting in and out of lucidity and just desperately uncomfortable.

'It's them,' he muttered after a minute. 'Relax.' He rested his ice cold hand on my forehead gently, trying to put me more at ease. Shortly afterwards the others started stumbling into the clearing through the trees; the number of Infected had been more than halved and only about twenty stood around us now, all bleeding from the neck where they'd dug out their trackers. With a pang of relief I noticed that all four interns seemed to have made it.

'Oh dear,' Renee murmured when she saw me. 'You...?'

'I got bit,' I confirmed.

'Me too,' Chris muttered, trying for a grin, and collapsing heavily beside me. I scooped a handful of brain out of the napkin and offered to him; he blanched. 'Try me again in a few hours,' he suggested, half-groaning with pain.

'Who bit you?' Riley asked, looking around me at him.

'Already taken care of,' Chris assured him. 'That Maria chick took his head clean off.' He leaned in and elbowed me suggestively. 'I think she might have thing for me,' he said, winking exaggeratedly.

'How was IH299 when you guys left?' I asked.

'Bloody,' Felix said. 'Really bloody.'

'You know when you see mass graves on the news?' Kristen asked. 'Kind of like that. But worse.'

'If anybody is left alive then it's because they stayed inside,' Renee informed us. 'I wouldn't say there are more than a couple dozen still breathing in the whole damn place.'

We descended into silence as ruminated on this for a while.

'So what next?' Chris asked eventually. 'What are we gonna do in the morning?'

'All Infected stick together,' Riley said authoritatively. 'We're safer together and we can keep each other in check. If anybody tries to leave, you die. If you kill a human outside of self defence, you die. If you eat a brain that wasn't already dead, you die. We need to hold each other accountable.'

There wasn't a whole lot of arguing; the others all seemed pretty happy with these arrangements and I realised they were all probably just relieved to have somewhere to go and someone to follow after having been imprisoned for so long.

'What about us?' Kristen asked.

'Probably safer if you stick with us as well,' I suggested. 'They know you were in on it and they know everything you did. They'll execute you if they catch you.'

All three of them nodded slowly.

Silence fell again and the only real sounds were those of Chris and I occasionally groaning through our transformation; a few hours after everyone had arrived I found my hand straying towards the napkin almost of its own volition, rolling a piece of the brain around in my fingers absently and only realising what I was doing when I brought it towards my face and had to stop myself.

'Go on,' Riley encouraged me, grinning. 'You'll feel better as soon as you do, I promise.'

'This is so disgusting,' I muttered.

'Give it to me then,' Chris groaned, reaching across me to take a piece as well and stuff it into his mouth. 'Yeah, this is gross,' he muttered, before swallowing. 'But also like... Really good.'

I screwed up my face doubtfully but finally closed my eyes and held my breath, popping the piece in my hand into my mouth reluctantly.

And I could kind of see what he meant.

I knew it was brains, and I knew that was gross.

And the texture and taste were pretty bad.

But as soon as I felt it on my tongue I started to feel better, and when I swallowed I felt stronger, more invigorated.

'See?' Riley asked.

'Shut up,' I muttered, reaching for some more; between us, Chris and I finished off the whole thing.

Some of the others had been talking quietly amongst themselves but almost all the conversations had died out as everybody turned their attention to us, watching us reluctantly chowing down on someone's grey matter.

'So that's it then,' I muttered once it was finished.

'How do you feel?' Renee asked, eyeing us warily.

'Better,' Chris supplied.

'Stronger,' I added.

'Not hungry,' Chris assured them, and they visibly relaxed.

'We should get some sleep,' Felix pointed out to Kristen and Renee. 'It's only a couple of hours until sunrise and we'll have to get moving early. They'll send people to find us all at first light, if they haven't already.'

The others nodded.

'You know this is just the start of it, right?' Renee asked, looking around at everyone. 'Like, we had our little rebellion or whatever, freed the slaves. But it's not over. It might never be over. This is the part where we wander the desert for forty years. There isn't anywhere on the planet that any of us are safe right now. There's nowhere we can go, other than to keep moving and hope they don't catch up.'

There were another few moments of silence as we all thought about this. She was right.

'What I'm saying,' she went on, grinning now and obviously trying to lighten the mood since the message she'd been trying to get across had clearly landed, 'is that you two,' she waggled her fingers at Riley and I, 'had better never break up - yes, even though you're going to live forever - since we all went to bat for you and are now fugitives.'

Everyone started laughing and I glanced sideways at Riley, embarrassed but happy when he leaned into me and we rested against one another contentedly.

A couple of minutes later the few remaining humans lowered themselves to the ground and curled up to go to sleep; a few of us took turns draping our jackets over them so they wouldn't be cold.

'You okay to move?' Riley asked quietly and I nodded, letting him haul me to my feet and move a little bit away from the crowd through the trees, so we could still see them but had a bit more privacy. 'Where's your head?' he asked, looking at me nervously.

I took a deep breath. 'I'm not sure. I'm okay, I guess? I mean I'm not panicking or freaking out, which is a lot better than I ever would have thought if you'd asked me how I'd react before.'

He nodded. 'I guess we don't have to worry about me not hurting you anymore,' he supplied.

'You can bite me all you want,' I said quietly, lowering my head but looking up at him pointedly.

'Don't tempt me,' he said, grinning.

'But that's what I'm trying to do,' I countered flatly, before leaning in and kissing him, hard. I pushed him back and he let me, crawling over him and lowering my body onto his, and nipping gently at his lip.

'Hey,' he mumbled. 'I thought that was my job.'

'Do it, then,' I challenged him, and he slipped one hand around to the back of my head, pulling me down and closing his teeth around my lip, sinking them into it sharply for a few seconds. 'Huh,' I said thoughtfully, when he pulled away. 'I guess I really am stronger now. Is that all you've got?'

 Riley rolled his eyes. 'Oh, bite me.'