Dead Stop Read Free Page B

SNAPPED M ELISSA, and I thrust myself through the gap where the window had been. I tried not to think about nearby zombies as I dangled, balancing half-in and half-out of the window, a couple of metres off the ground.
    My hands scrabbled against the prefab outer wall, and I shuffled myself around so that I was kind of lying on my back, and my fingers could reach the gutter above me. The wall I was leaning on was only a few inches thick, so I was pivoting with pretty much my whole body weight resting on a tiny part of my spine.
    It was agony, and by comparison the cuts I was sustaining from fragments of glass and wood splinters as I shuffled around were nothing.
    I could hear a low moaning nearby. My eyes hadn’t quite adjusted to the darkness, and hanging like this was making me nauseous and blurry-eyed.
    From inside the window, currently blocked by my own body, I could hear a muffled crash.
    Feet kicking aimlessly, trying to use the ceiling inside to push myself, I wriggled out of the window as fast as I could, pulling myself up and out towards the roof, not sure whether the zombies outside or the one indoors would get me first.
     
     
    F IRST CONTACT WITH a ghost wanting to talk to me was the worst, which is not to say that my second, third and so on contacts were a picnic.
    Eventually I did try and hold down conversations with some of them, but all I got was incoherent bitterness and circular rambling, petty complaints preserved and looped in a timeless state outside of life.
    If that sounds cod-profound, I apologise, but I’ve had a long time not telling people any of this, during which I’ve had plenty of opportunity to perfect the phrasing in my mind.
    Anyway, through school and then college and then work I became more aware of the spirit world and its quirks, but even more eager to stay away from it. I learned to avoid not just cemeteries and old buildings, but anywhere that’s been densely populated for any amount of time at all.
    Staying away from the dead meant staying away from the living, so I found myself a dull IT niche that allowed me to work from home in my nice boring newtown box of a house where no one had even really lived, never mind died.
    I breathed, I ate, I slept. I avoided ghosts, and tried to ignore them when I couldn’t avoid them altogether.
     
     
    I T’S A TRUTH universally acknowledged that most people wish they went to the gym more, as Jane Austen would doubtless have said if she’d been a fatty with a desk job. I was no exception, although in my case ‘more’ meant ‘at all.’ It was therefore a surprise even to me that I managed to lever myself out of the window and on to the relative safety of the diner roof.
    It was a flat roof, an expanse of dark grey tiles stuck together with tar. It had been raining, and shallow puddles revealed where the roof was beginning to sink. Specks of grit in the roof surface glittered, reflecting the light from the ‘Diner’ sign shining down on us.
    Catching my breath, I gingerly worked my way around the roof, peeking over the edge; holding back, so that, hopefully, anything I saw wouldn’t see me before I had a chance to duck down again.
    ‘They like the light,’ said Melissa, crossing the dodgy looking patches of rooftop with the lack of concern you’d expect from someone who didn’t actually weigh anything. ‘Maybe their eyes fail first?’
    She seemed to be right. Under the glare of the diner’s rotating neon sign, a number of zombies were milling around, stumbling across the car park outside the diner. There were at least a dozen, and while they shambled about in all directions, they didn’t seem to stray too far from the single solitary car, which presumably belonged to the owner of the diner. Even if I could get back into the diner—the periodic crashing from below seemed to suggest that wasn’t a good idea—and somehow find the keys, there was no way I was getting to the car safely.
    It seemed like Melissa’s plan was still my