Dead Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page B

forearm
with my hand.
    “I could ask
you the same question,” he shot back, but his voice wasn’t angry –
just confused sounding. “What’s happened to us?”
    “I don’t know,”
I whispered and took my hand away.
    “I wasn’t
expecting to spend the rest of eternity sniffing red roses or
dancing in the hills singing, The Hills Are Alive
With the Sound of Music like Julie-freaking-Andrews, but I
did think that perhaps we could…”
    “Play happy
families?” I cut in.
    “Not that
either,” he said. “Just you and me…together.”
    “We are
together,” I said, but I knew exactly what he meant, so I added,
“Look, we’ve been through so much. None of us are finding this
easy. At first I was so happy to wake and find that I had you,
Isidor, and Kayla back again, but that happiness soon faded. And I
know you feel the same. We all feel it. I lay awake at night
listening to the sound of Kayla crying – it can’t be easy for her
to know that she was murdered by Luke. He betrayed her.”
    “He betrayed
all of us,” Potter spat and stuck a cigarette in the corner of his
mouth. “He was my friend too. To know that he was behind everything
that we went through – to know that he set Murphy up like that –
that’s hard to deal with.”
    “Exactly,” I
said, looking at him as he lit the cigarette. “We all lost one way
or another and then to wake to find that we are the walking dead
and...” I cut off before I said anything more.
    “And what?” he
asked, streams of blue smoke jetting from his nostrils.
    “Nothing,” I
said back, thinking of the cracks.
    “Why don’t we
just go away?” he suggested, coming closer to me.
    “We are away ,” I said and I let him take me into
his arms. “Or perhaps you were thinking of some kind of holiday?
Disneyland perhaps?” and I half-smiled.
    “Grizzel’s,” he
said, looking into my eyes.
    “Sorry?” I
asked sounding confused.
    “There is no
such place as Disneyland here, not anymore at least,” he said.
“There is no Walt Disney or Mickey Mouse. There is Cornelius
Grizzel and a maggot called Frogskin – but no mouse called Mickey.
It’s like good old Disney never existed.” Then looking at me he
added, “You’re not the only one who has noticed the world has been
pushed.”
    “Pushed?” I asked him, sensing he knew more about this
than I had first thought.
    “It’s like the
world has been pushed off course,” he
said, dropping the cigarette to the ground and grinding it out with
his boot. “The world that we have come back to is different from
the one we left behind when we went down into The Hollows.
Something has changed – something happened.”
    “Like
what?”
    “I don’t know,”
he shrugged. “Not everything has changed.”
    “Isidor told me
about London now being called Linden ,” I
told him.
    “It gets better
than that,” he half-smirked, but I could see that look of concern
again behind his eyes. “Houston, Texas? Or Euston , Texas as it’s now known. ‘ Euston, we have a problem.’ Sounds the same, but not
quite.”
    “So what do you
think happened while we were away?” I asked.
    “Perhaps
nothing changed while we were away,” he said, fixing me with a
stare. “Perhaps we’ve come back to a different world, one that has
been pushed sideways a little.”
    “But how come
no one else has noticed the changes?” I asked him. “I mean, people
would notice if Disneyland just vanished, wouldn’t they?”
    “Not if it was
never here in the first place,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“Not if it had always been this Drizzle dude.”
    “You said
Grizzel before,” I reminded him.
    “Whatever!
Grizzel or Drizzle – it all amounts to the same thing,” he said. “I
don’t think the humans have ever known any different.”
    “But why aren’t
the changes bigger?”
    “I think the
capital of England suddenly having a new name is a pretty big
deal,” he said, looking at me.
    “No, I don’t
mean like