Goldhawk Road
Disclaimer: I have nothing but love for the London Tube and I do not share any of the negativity expressed here
Three Days Earlier had found Erik in the Tube, squeezed in between a middle-aged woman in a pastel-coloured business-suit absent-mindedly skimming through the Evening Standard and a adolescent with purple hair who tortured Erik's heightened senses with the music blaring from his headphones. Erik considered strangling the boy with them, until his brain was cut-off from oxygen and the neurons fired their last sparks when Erik cracked his skull open and sunk his teeth into his auditory cortex right in front of the other passengers.
The Tube seemed like the appropriate place to start the zombie apocalypse. Who'd be able to tell the difference to the usual early-morning commuters?
Taking a deep breath, he pulled his hood deeper into his face, trying to blend out the sound of long nails clacking on the screens of smartphones and the smell of the woman opposite to him who had to be working at a perfumery - there was no other explanation for this explosion of contradictory scents. He could hardly smell her brain over this mixture of dozens of different inconsistent flowery and musky smells.
His target was still there. A thin man in a dark suit who had been pretending to read the Tube-map above the windows opposite to him ever since they got on the train and who was probably unaware of the beginnings of a bitter-smelling bacterial abscess in his brain.
Only when the mechanical voice announced White City as the next station he looked up. ("This Is A Central Line Train To Ealing Broadway, Please Mind The Gap!", the voice recited, because it wanted Erik to suffer. It knew what he was, where he was and wanted to punish him with that constant, grating repetition. Involuntarily, his teeth snapped at nothing, earning himself a few odd looks, while he wished he could grab that voice somehow and make it shut up.)
At White City, his target got off and Erik allowed him a safe headstart before following after him.
He was surrounded by the vibrant smells of different brains, desperately focussing on the back of the man's head, following it through the masses like a beacon (a disgusting beacon with a bacterial abscess) to Wood Lane where he got on the next train ("This Is A Circle Line Train..."), because apparently the cosmos wasn't willing to spare Erik purgatory just because he was still walking about instead of lying somewhere in a peaceful cool grave.
The coaches here were almost empty and Erik made sure to use a different door than his target and to then turn his back on him, only concentrating on the man's smell and the noises he made to keep track of him.
People had many misconceptions about zombies. Or possibly they didn't - after all the zombies in films and books had been there before Shaw had labelled his creations as such. But either way people believed zombies were stupid, brainless creatures.
Erik hadn't noticed any significant loss of cognitive function ever since he became what he was now, except when he was famished and anxious for a brain.
But...he'd always had a habit of overlooking the obvious.
Only when the voice announced Goldhawk Road ("This Is A Circle Line Train!"), his overloaded brain noticed that something was amiss.
Goldhawk Road was his station. The station where he got on and off whenever he could afford the Tube to chase Shaw's cronies around the city or looked for people who deserved to be his next meal.
And of course this was where his target moved to get off, the target he had found out about after he threatening to remove every single tooth from one of Shaw's accomplices' mouth, the target he'd been following the entire day and this was where he was headed.
He weighed his options. Staying on the train or getting off and following the man.
If they had found his hiding place, he needed to know, he had to be prepared.
("This Is A Circle Line Train-")
He got off before Phil Sayer could remind him to Mind The Gap and followed his target up the stairs onto the open street where he instantly headed down the familiar path towards Sulgrave Road. Erik was careful to keep his eyes on the ground, the hood deep into his face and the distance between them inconspicuous, using the few others pedestrians between them for cover.
A buzz of static...
"It's not inside the building."
The voice was so faint, Erik had almost missed it.
"It's behind you."
The source was easily identified - It came from his target. But it wasn't his own voice.
Erik could see him raise his hand to his ear.
"It's following you!"
The target was turning around, his eyes scanning his environment for 'it', his hand still hovering above his earphone.
'It', Erik realised, was him - of course 'it' was him -
He hardly had any time to be offended at being dehumanised in such a manner (and on some level, they probably had a point), because his target was turning around.
Erik took cover behind a group of chattering tourists before the target could spot him and listened for more instructions via the target's earphones, but none came.
Instead he heard the sound of glass shattering on pavement exactly from where the man's smell came - which was suddenly covered by another scent, a stronger scent. A smell that consumed all others, that of the cars passing by, that of the canalisation below, and that of the smoke in the air - the smell of the city that he had learnt to associate if not with peace then with safety.
The smell of human brain matter surrounded him now, stronger than it had ever been before, sweet and fleshy and everywhere and yet non-distinct. It smelt of old and of young, of cancer and dementia - The monster inside him was screaming and clawing. He was dizzy, his cold flesh suddenly burning hot and the world turning red before his eyes.
Suddenly the only thing he could concentrate on was the smell and the people around him who didn't notice anything, didn't notice this smell, his hunger was tearing at him…
Mindless beasts in cages, their flesh rotting away, snapping teeth, twitching limbs, clawing hands and their eyes were empty, dead…
Erik forced himself to focus, pressed his jaws together and balled his fists, kept walking as if nothing were wrong.
His target was no longer where Erik had last seen him - the only trace of him was a broken vial from which the smell of foodnowhunger came, a few drops of fluid on the pavement sent out these dizzying waves, a few drops enough to consume his mind, luring out the beast that he was trying to keep in check at any moment.
Suddenly he smelled something bitter, familiar … His target with the brain abscess.
Erik turned just in time to see the man right next to him, his hand shooting forward towards his neck. There was a flash of silver and electric crackling and a slight sting and then he could feel his muscles slacken and his sight fade to darkness.
Three Days Later
No rotten hole can ever quite live up to the rotten hole we call home. Not that Erik considered himself overtly attached to his tiny attic flat in Hammersmith. His few earthly possessions were stowed away in bags and backpacks, ready to be picked up at a moment's notice. What he did enjoy was the thick insulation of the walls that served to keep some of the outside-noises out and the high-capacity refrigerator he had stolen from his late landlord.
Still dressed in his equally stolen hospital scrubs and a similarly obtained coat, Erik made his way up the narrow, wooden stairs, the familiar groan of each step beneath his feet music to his ears. He opened the door with the spare-key he unimaginatively hid inside the pot of a dead palm tree on the ground floor. With no money on him and his borrowed Oyster Card lost, he had to walk all the way from the hospital near the Scrubs to his little apartment in Sulgrave Road, trying not to scratch, bite, eat or infect anyone.
Which would be a Bad thing, because humans were Good and Nice and because there were enough Hollywood studios who'd inevitably sue him for copyright violations if he infected someone and started the reign of the undead.
Couldn't afford that.
The bustling streets of London were a buffet to him and he was a starving man with nothing but willpower to keep him from taking a bite.
He was always hungry, every second of every day. Even when he'd just eaten, he felt starved, ready to sink his teeth into the next human's neck, tackle them to the ground, ready to crack their skulls open and scrape out the insides.
If he didn't feed, it became worse. And he feared the day he would lose control; the day his hunger would take over his mind, take over him and destroy him.
He locked and bolted the door behind him, as if it could keep the city out, as if he could no longer smell the brains of the people living beneath him, as if he could no longer smell the pigeon sitting on the roof above or the mouse eating its way through the insulation in the wall behind the shower. The brains of animals didn't even get the job done, did nothing to stave off the hunger - been there, done that - and yet his instincts felt the constant need to remind him of their presence.
He put the stolen keys to the morgue down in the middle of the kitchen table. A promise. If the streets of London were the buffet he couldn't touch, these were the keys to the fridge.
Inside his own, actual fridge were the remains of his landlord, a man who had managed to convince the police that the death of his wife had been accident, but hadn't managed to convince the zombie three floors above. So far, disposing of his body had proven to be difficult, underlining the irony that was the (after-)life of the modern-day zombie. The cities were full of temptations but with little unguarded spots wherein to discard your bodies. The countryside had hiding places in abundance- but prey was limited.
That, and it didn't have him.
Shaw.
The man he lived to kill.
The thought of Shaw made red-hot anger coil inside his stomach and he snapped his teeth at the thin air - another habit he had picked up after death. He considered unfreezing a few of Mr. Ken's limbs and take a bite out of those. But as much as the taste of human flesh could sooth his nerves, he didn't want to have his body grow accustomed to having more food than necessary. Rather save those for scarce times, when there were no brains around and he needed something to take the edge off.
Instead he switched on the telly, already set to the lowest possible volume, and made himself comfortable on his thin mattress beneath the only window and let his mind drift away until he was sunken into a thoughtless, almost vegetative state - the only substitute he had left for sleep.
He missed dreaming.
For his body, there was no slow transition from 'sleeping' to 'waking' state.
His body snapped back to full awareness the moment his body had fully recuperated.
In a split-second he absorbed the time on the clock on the microwave (9:23), the date visible on the background of the news-segment currently shown on tv (2.10.16.) and the spider happily scuttling across his face (quickly flicked away under the heater beneath the windowsill).
He was brimming. Both with energy and with hunger - admittedly, it was becoming increasingly hard to discern the two.
He had a strange appetite for sweet, sugar-coated pastries, a preference which he blamed on the brain he had consumed yesterday. Not that he would be able to taste them if he indulged the craving- while all his other senses had gone into overdrive ever since he had transitioned into this zombie-state, his sense of taste was now limited to various shades of 'cardboard'.
Instead he popped a handful of appetite suppressants and and smoked a few cigarettes to take the edge off his hunger.
He took a long shower - enjoying the warmth even a lukewarm shower could provide his cold body with and then focussed his attention on the central aspects of his life:
His hunger and his revenge.
And right now he could focus his attention on the latter. At least until Xavier fessed up to the theft and the hospital exchanged the locks to the morgue.
Shaw knew where he lived (well...not lived in the most literal sense, but…) which meant he had to find a new place to stay. Not easy with no money to his name and his former landlord dead in the fridge.
The most important question now was - What had happened between his target knocking him out and his return to consciousness?
And he knew exactly where to start.
Erik didn't know the working hours of a pathologist, but he had firmly expected the mortuary to be empty by midnight. Instead he opened the door to the morgue to the scent of a familiar brain and the sight of the body carrying it around inside its skull.
Xavier was sitting in a chair right opposite to the door, legs crossed, a book in his lab and looking straight at Erik - this time less disappointed and more...reproachful. Erik still thought he'd make a good teacher - it helped that he had exchanged his lab coat for a beige, three-piece-suit. Erik suppressed an old twinge of self-consciousness at the sight of a man in a suit like that. Growing up on a high-rise estate in Garath, suits and men wearing them were alien. Something he'd see on television or in newspapers. They were politicians, doctors or judges in a court of law. He pushed the last thought to the back of his mind, where it belonged.
Erik still felt underdressed in his leather jacket and the oversized hoodie beneath it. There was power in clothes and Erik hated being powerless.
Xavier put his book aside, but Erik caught a glimpse of its title. Suspended Animation In Humans.
"I was waiting for you."
"I can see that," Erik said, his mind already working on a lie befitting the occasion.
"Well, you stole my keys. I figured you would be back for more."
"More of what?" Or semi-convincing innocence.
"Brains of course. I hardly think you will find human brains at your local Tesco." He raised his hand and pointed at something laying beside him on the table. A camera. "We record the post mortem here. It's actually very hard holding a pen when your hands are covered in body fluids. The camera was still filming when you opened the skull of Ms. Abati and...ate her brain."
Erik sniffed the air. Other than Xavier, no living soul around. Or brain. Which at least suggested that Xavier hadn't called the police. And yet, the man seemed at ease around Erik.
Xavier raised his hands, as if to show Erik that he was unarmed. "Please - There is no one here but us. You can trust me."
"That's an unexpected response to the whole...brain-eating-thing."
"I figured you wouldn't eat them, if you didn't have to. You need to eat them, right? Like a...you know…" A vague hand gesture. At least Xavier had the decency to appear as if he himself couldn't believe what he had just implied.
"Maybe I'm just psychotic," Erik suggested.
"You were dead, when you were brought here. Pronounced so independently by three doctors - including me. That seems like a very elaborate plan for anyone to gain access to brains, no matter how psychotic."
"Or maybe I'm a junkie? The wrong dose of the wrong stuff...and my heart stopped. And I woke up with a craving for brains."
Xavier raised a single brow.
"You were brain-dead as well. That's nothing people just wake up from." So Shaw had done it. Certainly not as he had imagined it, but he was coming closer, step by step. "There is something else." Xavier said carefully.
"Tell me."
"Certainly."
Not that Erik knew much about all the services a morgue typically provided, but nothing of this seemed that straight-forward, but when Xavier got up from his chair and asked Erik to follow him, he did, past the tables and the drawers and into the little office where he had stolen the scrubs.
Xavier followed his eyes.
"Ah, yes. Is there any hope that you could return those? Before Dr Pratt notices that they went missing, preferably?"
"You wanted to show me something."
Xavier shoulders sank and he looked disappointed once again, but he still turned towards the desk next to the wall of the small office and started searching through a stack of files until he pulled out one labelled 'John Doe' in crude block letters.
"That's yours." Without further explanation, Xavier took a small stack of photos from the file and put them down on the table, one after another.
"That's how they found you."
His own body, sprawled out on the pavement in the tattered remains of his clothes, with a knife sticking out of the centre of his chest. Photographs from several different angles and with signs with numbers on them scattered all around his body.
He looked the part of a proper murder-victim.
Xavier's finger landed on the knife in his chest.
"When you were brought here, every trace of that injury was gone," Xavier explained. "It just healed."
The best option would be to kill Xavier on the spot. To stab him in the chest, undress him, label him a John Doe and put him into one of his own drawers, switch off the cooling and wait for the decay to disfigure him beyond recognition so that he could replace Erik's own missing body.
But of course that wouldn't work, there were more people than him working here, they'd notice. He would have to get Xavier at home or somewhere secluded, make it look like a mugging gone badly…
But Charles Xavier was innocent. Erik didn't kill innocent people.
"I haven't told the police anything so far," Xavier said. "If that is what you're worried about."
"Where did they find my body?"
Xavier turned a different page of his file.
"Not far from here - West Acton. Goldsmith Avenue."
If Shaw was behind this - and Erik had little doubt that he was, after being knocked out by one of the man's cronies who had known exactly where Erik lived - he must have found a new hiding place. Or dumped Erik on a random road to throw him off. The other question was - why would Shaw let him go? He must even have fed him - healing was a pain, when he hadn't eaten in a while, and yet the wound had faded while he was asleep. But Shaw had never cared whether Erik was in pain.
Perhaps he had thought Erik was now - irreversibly and unconditionally - dead.
"Does any of this make sense to you?" Xavier asked.
"No." He didn't know why he answered - even less why he answered honestly. The less Xavier knew the better. But all the pathologist did was nod patiently and sort his papers back into the file.
Then he stopped and looked at Erik, his brow slightly furrowed, looking thoughtful, like a chess-player considering a new move.
"I wrote a paper once," He finally said. "On how genetic mutation could stretch human healing abilities beyond anything that could be accomplished by natural or medical means. While I didn't anticipate the consumption of brain-matter…"
"What are you trying to say?"
"I think I can help you."
"I don't need any help."
"Someone did this to you. Perhaps I could find a way to reverse it," Xavier's voice trailed off. "...also I have access to as many brains as you need."
"What do you get out of it?"
"Nothing. I'm a doctor. I swore an oath to heal people. You have a disease and there is no one else who can help you."
A part of him wanted to trust Xavier and his blue, beseeching eyes, but he knew better. People couldn't be trusted and least of all could doctors be trusted and no one ever did anything if they got nothing out of it.
"What would you need to do?"
"I'd...need samples. Do some research. I need to understand how this works and how it could be reversed. Or at least treated. It would take time. Lots and lots of time, I fear."
Erik tried not to think of Shaw's research. Tried not to see himself strapped down into a chair, watching IVs drip into his body and blades cut and nick away at his skin to retrieve samples or simply for Shaw to watch his flesh knit itself back together again to satisfy his scientific curiosity. Xavier couldn't be trusted. He was either working for Shaw or he was trying to conduct his own experiments, preparing a new ordeal for Erik.
But there was only one way to find out which it was and - if Xavier was working for Shaw - to use him to find Shaw.
"I accept your offer."
"Splendid!" Xavier's face brightened up at that as if Erik had done something wonderful for him and he stretched out his hand. "Dr Charles Xavier."
Erik scrutinised the hand hovering between them, but then he shook it. Charles' skin was smooth and warm.
"Magnus Eisenhardt. A pleasure to meet you."
If Charles Xavier really was working for Shaw he was either a lot more intelligent or a lot dumber than he appeared.
"You should come home with me," He had proposed in passing. "It's not far from here - just a trip down the street in case you ever feel...peckish." That suggestion had almost made the proposal sound like a potentially long-term arrangement, but Erik had agreed and Dr Xavier ("Please, call me Charles!") had appeared delighted. And maybe it was for the best. If he wanted to find out whether the man was working for Shaw, he couldn't leave him out of his sight, had to be ready when Shaw decided to make contact with him, and then he'd finally have him...
It turned out Xavier really did live closeby, no more than a three minute (and one-cigarette) walk down the street, filled with Xavier incessantly prattling about his job, home or how he was planning to cure Morbus Zombie. Not that Erik understood a word of what he said on that subject.
Erik took it as a sign that his new companion was nervous.
"And there we are!"
Xavier's house - not just a flat, they stood in front of an entire house, there was just one name on the door sign - would appear humble anywhere else, but Erik knew that by London-standards this was luxurious.
"It's quite humble, I'm afraid."
"Yes. Absolutely."
"But I have a sleep couch. You can sleep there...if you sleep. Do you sleep?" The way Xavier kept pretending that this was a long term arrangement implied that either he didn't know when Shaw would contact him or had his own trap prepared... "It's very comfortable. At least my sister never complained when she was here." A sister. Erik filed that information away with a question mark attached.
Then he decided to humour him.
"You want me to stay here?"
"Of course. I can't find a cure to your little..problem...if I don't know exactly what kind of influences you're exposed to. And if you need to grab a bite - it's just down the road. We don't want any incidents, do we?"
Erik wanted to argue that there never had been any 'incidents', that he had never eaten anyone who didn't deserve it (at least ever since it was no longer Shaw who controlled his diet. Who knew what and whom they had fed him in the labs), but he swallowed his anger down. Rather let Xavier be the one who feared him, feared the day he woke up to Erik cracking his skull open with a stapler.
After some fumbling with the keys - another sign of nervousness? - Xavier managed to open the door and Erik followed him inside and used Xavier's passionate tour of the house to verify that except for the two of them no one was here. He was likely planning to inform Shaw the moment Erik let him out of his sight and when they came, he'd be trapped here.
The living room Xavier let him into was big and would probably look the part, if the space wasn't so efficiently used up by shelves full of books, stacks of books that obviously hadn't fit into the shelves, journals, folders and an honest-to-g-d blackboard full of equations and scribbles he couldn't make sense of.
With an apologetic attempt at a smile, Xavier picked up a few books from a table and - when he found no proper place to put them - deposited them on a different stack of books which started swaying perilously.
"I'm sorry. It's a mess, I know. I'll...clean it up. Not now, tomorrow perhaps...just...throw anything out that's in the way. Make yourself at home."
Erik's 'home' had distinctly less things in it and you could hear the mice crawling behind the walls there and smell the pot one of the former residents must have smoked at an alarming rate. He decided not to make himself at home.
"And the kitchen is through here,"
In contrast to the living room the kitchen looked as if taken straight out of the IKEA-catalogue and then hardly used, except for a bin stuffed full of empty delivery boxes. Every surface was smooth, minimalist and polished and even the fridge hardly gave off any scent of food. Which was probably better than the smell of dead landlord.
"I'm...actually a good cook, but when you live alone...I know it's a bad habit, but…"
Next to the kitchen sink stood a full knife block and Erik weighed his options, before choosing the filet knife over the cleaver and pulling it out.
Xavier halted in his description of all seven settings of his light switches and turned around.
"What are you doing?"
"There is something I need to ask."
"Of course." Xavier looked at him expectantly, seemingly unperturbed by the sight of the blade in his hand.
Erik tested the blade of the filet knife on his thumb and watched as as the blade sliced through his skin only for the bloodless cut to knit itself back together in a matter of seconds.
"Magnus?"
Xavier stepped closer and Erik struck too fast for the good doctor's human reflexes to kick in, grabbing him by the throat and pushing face first down onto his own kitchen table. The confused protests ended swiftly when Xavier felt the filet knife pressing against his throat.
"And now you will tell me exactly - what happened to me and Where. Can. I. Find. Dr. Sebastian. Shaw?"