ZOM-B Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

screwdrivers, things like that.
    ‘This is all about practical application,’ he tells me. ‘Apart from some knives, we will not send you out armed. You will fight mostly with your hands, but if you ever need a weapon, you must know how to make use of whatever you can find.’
    I ask him why we don’t use guns. ‘The zombies don’t have any. Surely we could just go out with rifles and mow them down.’
    ‘There would be no honour in that,’ he replies.
    ‘But isn’t this all about winning?’ I press.
    ‘Not at any cost,’ he says. ‘Oystein is adamant about that. If we are to build a better world, we cannot do so by relying on the barbaric ways of the past.’
    ‘Reilly has a taser,’ I note.
    ‘Reilly is human,’ Zhang says calmly. ‘We are not. We have a choice — we can be less than we were or we can try to be more.’
    ‘It would be a lot easier if we had guns,’ I mutter.
    ‘The easy way is not always the better way,’ he says. ‘If we wish to rise above our foul situation, we must work harder to be honourable in death than we ever had to in life.’
    Zhang shows me how to most effectively sharpen the bones sticking out of my fingers and toes. He says they’re our best weapons and he teaches me how toincorporate them into the moves, how to dig and slice and gouge.
    He also trains me to file my teeth in a different way. ‘You never know when you might have to rip out someone’s throat or chew through to their brain in a hurry.’
    ‘Is there honour in biting open a person’s throat?’ I ask innocently.
    ‘Less of your backchat,’ he growls but I know he’s smirking inside. We get along all right. We’re similar in many ways. Tough nuts.
    I don’t discuss Dr Oystein with the other Angels. In fact I don’t talk to them much at all. I’ve been brooding ever since that day in the aquarium. No matter which way I look at it, I can’t accept what the doc told me. And being unable to accept that he’s on a mission from God, I find it hard to accept anything else about him, his offer of refuge or a role in the war he’s waging. Rage and Carl are able to sweep their misgivings under the carpet. I can’t.
    Rage is fitting in better than me. He’s in his element, training hard with Master Zhang, messingabout with our room-mates, getting to know other Angels. He’s taken to this with ease.
    That pisses me off. I was sure that Rage would be the outcast here, the one that the others would be wary of. I was almost looking forward to the day when he betrayed us, so I could say, ‘Told you so!’ But, as things stand, I’m the one who doesn’t belong, who’s falling adrift a little further every day. It’s not that the others aren’t trying to be nice to me. They are. But I see them as stooges who are playing along with Dr Oystein for all the wrong reasons, so I feel awkward around them and keep pushing them away.
    The worst thing is, there’s no one for me to confide in. I’ve seen Dr Oystein a few times over the week, in corridors, the dining room and gym. He’s always smiled at me, made small talk a few times. I’m sure he’d be happy to discuss my concerns if I approached him, but what could I say? ‘Sorry, doc, I think you’re crazy and dangerous. Other than that you’re OK.’
    Mr Burke is the only person I’d feel comfortable chatting about this with, but he’s gone off again ona mission, to infiltrate another complex like the one where I was held captive, or to spy on Mr Dowling, or …
    Actually, I don’t know what Burke, Dr Oystein and the others get up to. There hasn’t been much talk of how we’re supposed to take the fight to Mr Dowling and his mutants. Things seem to operate on a need-to-know basis around here. Or maybe it’s on an
if-we-can-trust-her
basis. Perhaps they’re withholding information from me because they sense that I’m not fully committed.
    I suppose that’s logical. You don’t want to share all your secrets with someone who might walk out the