Dead Flesh Read Free Page B

moon logo as my iPod, I tried to make sense of
these little differences to what I had known before. Where had the
company Apple gone? Ford? McDonalds? The singers and songs that had
disappeared from my iPod?
    And what about
the newspaper cuttings that covered my walls, which told the
stories of people waking up six weeks ago to feel that everything
wasn’t quite right? I knew that humans, on a subconscious level,
knew that something was wrong – that something was missing –
something had been knocked slightly off balance.
    I read and
reread the stories of how men had woken to find their closets were
full of women’s clothes, shoes, and hats. Where had these things
come from? Who did they belong to? After all, they hadn’t
girlfriends or wives, but why had they woken to find silver and
gold coloured bands around their wedding fingers?
    What about the
passenger trains that had stopped suddenly, en route to their
destinations because the drivers had suddenly vanished? The
co-pilots, who suddenly looked up to find that they had taken off
without a pilot, and were now thirty thousand feet above ground.
And the patients who bled to death on operating tables, the medical
team gone.
    My walls were
covered in a thousand similar stories, and even though I knew what
had happened to all of those missing people, I still found it hard
to comprehend that so many Vampyrus had infiltrated human
civilisation and made lives for themselves. Those who had been left
behind were now left to stare, dazed and confused. It must have
been similar to being halfway through a conversation only to
suddenly forget what you were talking about. That awful searching,
scrambling of the mind as you tried desperately to remember but
just couldn’t.
    Sitting in one
of the dusty armchairs that I had taken from the attic, I looked at
the walls, which were a collage of black and white lines of print
and faces. Why had I collected them? I didn’t really know the
answer to that. Potter said that I had lost my freaking mind. He
either failed to see the changes that had taken place since coming
back from The Hollows – coming back from the dead – or he just
refused to notice them. But I think Isidor and Kayla understood why
I had collected all of those news cuttings and trawled for hours on
the Internet.
    Each day, Kayla
and Isidor would make the long drive into the nearest town and a
buy a copy of each available newspaper. They would bring them to
me, and sometimes in silence, but more often than not while
listening to music Kayla selected on my iPod, we would cut the
articles from the newspapers and tack them to my bedroom walls.
    Glancing at
them, I could see that they both looked lost, a perpetual look of
confusion engraved across their faces. Isidor was eighteen, Kayla
sixteen, and neither would grow any older. But like me, the
euphoria of being alive again had worn off and the reality of being
dead but alive weighed heavily upon them. Coming back to life where things had changed, however slight, had
changed them too.
    “What do we
do?” Isidor had asked me as the three of us had sat and cut
articles from the newspapers.
    “How do you
mean?” I asked, cutting carefully around an article about how no
one could understand how a Chief of Police had never been appointed
in London. And if there ever had been one, what had been their name
and where were they now?
    “What do we do
for the rest of eternity?” Kayla asked, stopping what she was doing
and looking at me. “We didn’t come back to sit on the floor of your
room cutting up newspapers. I mean I love spending time with you
Kiera, but…”
    “What did the
Elders tell you?” I asked, peering over the corner of the newspaper
at them.
    “They said we
were angels – dark angels – whatever that’s s’posed to mean,”
Isidor said, scratching the tiny beard that jutted from his chin.
“They told me I was to be called Malachi ,
Kayla, Uriel and…” with a smile on his
face, he added, “And