Cat was staying in an old house in Muswell Hill. It had been deserted before the zombie attacks, the doors and windows on the ground floor all boarded over from the outside. She’d found a ladder in the back garden of a house a few streets away–you couldn’t go into the hardware stores anymore, as almost all of them were packed with EIY (Eat It Yourself) zombies–and used that to get up and force open a window on the upper floor at the back of the house. The rooms were musty but clean, and she’d set up home there, maybe for a few days, maybe weeks—she would decide as she went along.
Cat picked up the ladder where it was lying in the garden, set it against the wall and climbed. She knocked it over once she’d let herself in, as she always did. If zombies saw it standing there during the night, they’d investigate. They might be brain-dead beasts but there weren’t entirely clueless. You didn’t have to be a genius to outwit them but you couldn’t underestimate them either.
In the morning, Cat would simply drop to the ground and go about her business. She was always careful to choose a room on a low floor. No penthouse apartments with spectacular views for her. The most important aspect of any home these days was that you were able to get out of it quickly and easily if you had to flee.
Cat laid out the goods that she had brought back–tins of food, a few bottles of water, a couple of sharp knives–then retired to a small bedroom. The windows weren’t boarded over here, but there were heavy curtains on them.
Cat sat by the bedroom window, parted the curtains carefully, just enough to let through a crack of sunlight, then settled down and picked up one of the many books that were lying nearby. She read until the light faded completely, then set the book aside, let the curtain close and lay down for the night.
These were the worst hours, before sleep came, when there was nothing to do. There was a larger bedroom at the front of the house, and a street lamp shone outside it—though many of the lights in the city no longer worked, some still did. Cat could have gone in there and carried on reading. But she was afraid that a zombie would see her shadow moving. It was safer in the darkness.
Cat found herself thinking about her sister Jules and her family, her husband Paul and Cat’s nephew George. They were the only people she really cared about. George had celebrated his eighth birthday just a week before everything went to hell, and Cat had helped organize his party. She often thought about that day, the fun she’d had, the way they’d all smiled as they posed for a photo together.
Cat had gone looking for her sister once she’d adjusted to life in a zombie-run world. She’d worked her way across to their house, spent several days in the neighborhood, found some survivors and asked if they knew anything about Jules Bearman and her loved ones. Unfortunately, like so many others, they’d disappeared without a trace, and while Cat hoped for the best–that they had escaped London and found shelter in a settlement outside the city–she feared the worst.
Cat would have liked to base herself in her sister’s house, but that would have been dangerous. She had come across dozens of corpses in their homes during the course of her travels, people who had been overly attached to their possessions, who hadn’t run when the chance presented itself.
Sentimentality was a weakness. Cat often rifled through the contents when she went through someone’s house, figuring the dead had no right to privacy. She’d take anything that caught her fancy–jewelry, artwork, books–but she didn’t hold on to anything for long, junking it before it could come to mean too much to her.
Cat took nothing from her sister’s home, not even the photo snapped on George’s birthday. When it came time to flee–as it surely would–she didn’t want to own anything she cared about. A person might pause in the middle of running away to think about prized items that they were leaving behind, and pausing was bad. In this world of the living dead, it could be the death of you.
Cat didn’t like thinking negatively, so in an attempt to drive away the dark thoughts, she started going through her plan for the next day, the streets she’d explore, the goods she would look for. Cat had moved all over London since escaping from school. She was taking the city a zone at a time, working her way through the boroughs.
In an ideal world she would have settled in Knightsbridge, in a lovely mansion, where she could have dressed up in designer frocks and tiaras every day. But although she’d made the most of the apocalypse and sampled the good life in some of London’s finest neighborhoods (“It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good,” she sometimes giggled as she went to sleep in a four-poster bed), she never stayed in one place for long, and bedded down in dumps as well as palaces. She’d spend a few days or weeks getting to know an area well and enjoying all that it had to offer, then move on before she grew complacent. No ties, and no pattern—that was how Cat liked it.
When Cat tired of looking ahead, she cast her thoughts back, but not as far as George’s party. Instead she recalled that day in the chemistry lab and all the days since, the three girls she had sacrificed, and the others who had followed.
Cat spent a long time remembering their faces and their expressions as she’d launched them at the zombies. It was cruel, but she found comfort in their distress. It made her feel strong, the fact that she had triumphed where they had fallen.
Stupid people, she thought. They should have been sharper, faster, more cunning. I’m here and they’re not, because I’m strong and they were weak. I’ll never be weak like that. Never.
Smiling grimly to herself, she drifted off to sleep, and the faces she saw in her dreams were the same faces she thought about when she was awake. Those faces were always with her, not because she couldn’t shake them loose, but because she was determined to hold them tight. There would be no second chances in life for those dumb failures. She had seized her opportunities. They hadn’t. They were zombie fodder, while she was a cold-hearted warrior who would do whatever it took to survive. If that meant becoming a monster, so be it. In a world of undead atrocities, Cat would choose abandoning her humanity and standing proudly among the monstrous every time. The alternative was a noble death, and to Cat Ward that was no sort of an alternative at all.