The perfect mother system

Chapter 14 : Zombie King (2),

The survivor camp announced itself before she saw it.

Sound first. The low hum of generators somewhere behind high walls, a sound so ordinary in its mechanical steadiness that it felt almost wrong in a world that had forgotten ordinary. Then light, actual electric light bleeding over the top of walls that had been constructed from everything available, concrete barriers and stacked vehicles and reinforced metal sheeting that caught the grey afternoon and threw it back dully.

Kate walked toward it through empty streets with her laser gun at her side.

The guards saw her when she was still fifty metres out.

There were four of them on the gate, armed with weapons that ranged from professional to improvised, and they had the bearing of people who had been doing this long enough to have stopped being surprised by most things. They watched her approach with the particular attention of people whose job was to assess threats, and she could see the calculation happening in their expressions as she got closer.

A young woman. Alone. Walking through the dead city without fear.

She stopped five metres from the gate.

One of them stepped forward. He was broad and carrying a metal rod that had clearly been used before.

"Nobody walks in alone," he said. "Where is your group."

"I do not have one," Kate said.

He looked at her for a moment and then looked at the others and something passed between them.

"You want entry you prove yourself," he said. "Those are the rules. Everyone enters the same way."

"What is the test," Kate said.

He almost smiled. Most people apparently asked differently.

He whistled once and two things happened simultaneously. A gate to the left of the main entrance opened and three zombies were pushed through it into the street, shambling and directionless until they caught the scent of living things ahead of them and oriented. And from the right, another guard came forward, the largest of the four, rolling his shoulders.

Kate looked at the zombies first.

She walked toward them.

The guards watched with the tense readiness of people prepared to intervene and not expecting to have to. The zombies moved in her direction and then did what zombies did when her zombie ability was active. They moved past her. Around her. Through the space she occupied as though she were part of the background of the dead world and not a living woman standing in the middle of a street.

The broad guard with the metal rod had gone very still.

Kate turned to the fighting guard.

He came at her with the confidence of someone who had won this particular test many times before. She let him close the distance and then she was not where he expected her to be, stepping to the side with a precision that Kelly's body understood even if Kate was the one directing it. She used his momentum and the laser gun as a counterweight and put him on the ground in four seconds.

He stayed there for a moment, reassessing.

She offered him her hand.

He took it, which she took as a good sign about the general character of the camp.

The main gate opened.

Kate walked through into the survivor camp of Chu Litian and took in what was inside with the same quiet comprehensive attention she had applied to the Lu estate on her first afternoon there. The camp was large, occupying several city blocks that had been connected and secured. The conditions were genuinely good by the standards of the world outside the walls. Electricity. Running water from what appeared to be a repurposed system. Structures that had been reinforced and made liveable.

But she noticed immediately how it was organised.

The people with power lived in the inner section, in the better buildings with the better supplies. The ordinary survivors occupied the outer rings and they were not miserable exactly but they were clearly operating in a different category of existence from the people at the centre. They worked. They carried things and maintained things and kept the camp functioning, and in exchange they received enough to survive on.

She was still mapping the layout when she heard it.

A voice she recognised from Kelly's memories, sharp and carrying, the kind of voice that had learned to project outrage as a first response to things it found threatening.

"You."

Kate turned.

Kelly's family was standing twenty metres away near one of the inner buildings. There were four of them, her parents and two relatives who had been part of the group that fled the dead city, and they were all looking at her with expressions that moved through shock and into something more complicated. She watched the guilty conscience work in their faces in real time, the way it always works in people who have done something they cannot quite bring themselves to fully acknowledge. The panic lasted only a second before it was covered over by the thing people reach for when they feel caught.

Aggression.

"How dare you show your face here," the woman she recognised as Kelly's mother said, stepping forward. "We mourned you. We thought you were dead."

"You left me," Kate said pleasantly.

"It was an accident," the father said, but his eyes did not match the words. "There was no time. The zombies were everywhere."

"She went back for you." The mother pointed at the adopted sister who was standing slightly behind the rest of them. "She tried. There was nothing she could do."

Kate looked at the adopted sister.

The girl was beautiful in the calculated way of someone who had spent years perfecting the performance of beauty. She was also the most afraid person in the immediate vicinity by a significant distance. Her face had gone a colour that had nothing to do with the cold and she was looking at Kate with the eyes of someone watching the thing they had buried come back to the surface.

She knew exactly what she had done.

She could not meet Kate's eyes for more than a second.

"I see," Kate said.

She said nothing else. She turned back to the gate guards to complete whatever entry process remained and heard the mother's voice rise behind her, louder now, calling her ungrateful and unstable and making claims about her character that became increasingly elaborate as they became increasingly desperate.

Kate did not respond.

From the elevated walkway above the inner gate, someone had been watching since before she entered.

She had not seen him yet. She became aware of him the way she had become aware of Lu Chengzou in the courtyard of the Lu estate, not by looking directly but by the quality of attention that a particular kind of presence produces in a space. Something focused and still and not casual in any way.

She looked up.

Chu Litian was not what she had expected and was exactly what she should have expected. He was tall, the kind of tall that changed the geometry of whatever he stood in, and the zombie virus had done something to the surface of him that was visible even from a distance. His eyes were slightly wrong, the colour off in a way that was subtle enough to make people uncertain whether they had seen it correctly. His expression was the complete absence of expression, which she recognised as something different from coldness. Coldness was a response to something. This was what existed before response, a neutrality so complete it had never needed to be constructed because nothing had ever required it to be otherwise.

He came down from the walkway.

He walked through the camp the way people walk when every living thing around them is aware of their movement and adjusting to accommodate it. The family went quiet when they saw him coming. The adopted sister took a step back behind the others.

He stopped in front of Kate.

He was close enough that she could see the eyes properly now. They were dark with something beneath the dark, a quality that was not human and was not not human, something in between that the zombie virus had created and left unresolved. He looked at her for a long moment.

Then he did something she did not expect.

He breathed in.

Not obviously. Not performatively. A subtle drawing in of air that most people would not have noticed. But Kate noticed and she watched his expression do something fractional and quickly controlled, a response to whatever his zombie senses had found that he had not anticipated finding.

Something shifted behind his eyes.

"You fought well," he said. His voice was low and even and produced without apparent effort.

"Thank you," Kate said.

He looked at her for another moment.

"You will take the room in the east building," he said. "Third floor."

He turned and walked back toward the inner section of the camp without further explanation.

Kate watched him go and noted two things. The east building was the inner section. The third floor of the east building, she had already assessed during her survey of the camp, was directly below the floor where Chu Litian himself was housed.

He had put her as close to himself as it was possible to put someone without putting them in his own quarters.

Behind her the adopted sister said something to the family in a low urgent voice that Kate could not fully hear.

She did not need to.

She picked up her laser gun and walked toward the east building.

Whatever Chu Litian's zombie senses had found in her scent, it had made him make a decision he had not planned to make.

She intended to make sure he never regretted it.