Free Zom-B Underground by Darren Shan Page B

intercedes.
    “We’ve guided her this far,” Burke counters. “There’s no harm in letting her go all the way.”
    I try to make sense of what I’ve been told, but I run into a brick wall. “It’s no good,” I tell Burke. “I don’t know what you want me to work out.”
    “Think,” Burke groans. “What’s the one thing that zombies everywhere–from those you’ve seen in movies to those you saw at the school–go wild for? If you had a zombie locked up, and it was bellowing and wailing, how would you calm it down?”
    “I don’t…”
    I stop, flashing on an image of the video footage that Josh showed me, of me bent over a boy, digging around inside his skull. In all the films I saw, all the comics I read, I never came across a zombie who didn’t hunger for the juicy gray matter common tohumans everywhere. The kind of gray matter, I realize with a sick jolt, that Reilly has been serving me every day.
    Burke sees that I’m up to speed. He grins humorlessly, then says without emotion, “They’ve been feeding you human brains to keep you conscious. You need them to survive.”
    “So tell us again,” Dr. Cerveris says smugly as I stare at them with revulsion and horror. “
Who’s
the monster here?”

THIRTEEN
    There’s a long silence while I come to terms with what I’ve been told. This is certainly a meeting to remember. It’s not every day that you find out you’ve got less than two years to live, and by the way, you’ve been feasting on human brains for the past month. But after my initial shock it doesn’t take me long to get a handle on myself.
    “Where do the brains come from?” I ask.
    Burke says, “I told you—humans.”
    “I mean, are you killing people in order to feed us?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” Dr. Cerveris snorts.
    “The casualties have been horrendous,” Josh explains. “We can’t put an exact figureon how many people have been slaughtered, but in London alone we reckon it must run into the millions.”
    “That’s not including the hundreds of thousands who have been turned,” Dr. Cerveris points out. “Just those who were killed, whose heads were cracked open, so that they couldn’t revive.”
    “We’ve mopped up a lot of the corpses,” Josh continues. “Reviveds rarely clean out a skull—they almost always leave bits of brain behind. Ever since we realized what revitalizeds need, we’ve been collecting brain matter and storing it.”
    There’s silence again. I stare at the wall above Burke’s head. This wasn’t how I saw my life going when I was at school. I didn’t have any great career plans, but cannibalism was
very
far down my list of options.
    I chuckle drily and lower my gaze. “You know what?” I grin crookedly. “Sod it. I always wanted to go on a TV show and eat things like bugs, snakes, roadkill. This is a dream come true. Bring it on. I’ll eat whatever the hell you chuck at me.” I rub my stomach slowly.
“Yum.”
    Burke smirks. “I told them you were a piece of work.” He glances at Josh. “I bet you’re glad now that you listened to me.”
    “We’ll see,” Josh mutters. “She hasn’t agreed to cooperate yet.”
    I frown, thinking back a few minutes, then turn to Burke. “Josh said it was thanks to you that I wasn’t still a zombie. What did he mean?”
    “I was coming to that before you sidetracked me.” Burke crosses his hands on the table and looks at me seriously. “Revitalizeds needbrains to thrive. If we don’t feed them, they regress. In most cases, the staff here let that happen.”
    I cock my head sideways. “Come again?”
    “The percentage of reviveds who revitalize is minuscule,” Dr. Cerveris says defensively. “But if you take a group of hundreds of thousands, even a fraction of a percent is significant.”
    “I figured there must be more of us,” I say slowly, “that adults and younger kids were being held elsewhere.”
    “Of course,” Dr. Cerveris says. “We keep a sample of all age groups,