A/N Fans of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's brilliant 'Paul' will hopefully enjoy the reference in this chapter!

Chapter 4

Malevolent Sugar

Fresh air and the physical exercise of her walk had made Daisy feel much more positive by the time she returned to the flat.

"Tim?" She called out hopefully as she stepped inside. Surely he and Mike must have returned by now. Then she saw the opened basket of biscuits.

"That little..." She broke off as she next took in the destroyed coffee table, and Tim's smashed phone on the floor. "What the... Tim! Mike!" No reply. She eyed the biscuits. Feeling she deserved a treat to get over the shock of coming home to a decimated coffee table, coupled with the evidence suggesting that Tim had already helped himself anyway, she rooted around in the basket, choosing a shape.

"Daisy!" She heard Tim yelling for her and his feet pounding up the stairs outside. She picked out a ghost and raised it to take a bite.

"Nooooooo!" Tim seemed to explode through the door and hurled himself across the room to knock the biscuit out of Daisy's hand.

"Oi!"

Tim landed head first on the sofa, rolling head over heels and swivelling simultaneously to emerge standing up and facing Daisy in a move which she could not help but admire, despite the situation.

"What's going on?"

"Don't...eat...the biscuits...Dais!" Tim gasped between deep drags of air. It was then that Daisy noticed the state he was in. Sweat was pouring down his face and the front of his t shirt was soaked, stuck to his lithe frame in a way which left little to the imagination. Her appreciation of his body, so rarely glimpsed, was eclipsed, however, by her indignation at his words.

"Why not? You obviously did!"

Tim's breaths rasped harshly as he struggled for oxygen.

"They're cursed, Dais! They're dangerous!"

Daisy laughed.

"Well that is imaginative, I'll give you that! Now tell me why you should get to eat them all?"

"I haven't had any!"

"Well who did?"

"Mike!" Tim's voice broke slightly over his name.

"Mike ate them and..." Tim grasped for words that didn't involve the 'z' one and came up empty. "They turned him into a zombie!"

"Stop joking around, Tim." Daisy started.

"DO I LOOK LIKE I'M FUCKING JOKING! I don't understand it, ok? But Mike ate them and the next minute he was... all fucked up! He couldn't talk and he couldn't see properly..."

Daisy's expression changed, realising Tim was serious.

"Is he alright? Where is he now?" She interrupted.

"He... They came and... they took him!"

"Who? Paramedics?"

"No! Some guys in fucking black suits! Big guys, Daisy!" Tim sucked in a desperate breath. "I tried to stop them... but there were six of them! It's fuckin' Duane! They put Mike in a van and took him to Duane's fuckin' mansion! I followed them on my board, but they were too fast to catch."

"You skateboarded all the way to Highgate?"

"Yes!"

"And back?"

"YES! Look, that's really not the point, Dais!"

"Sorry, I know. I'm just... struggling to take this in."

"Tell me about it." Tim's breathing was finally returning to normal. He was physically recovering, but also immensely relieved that Daisy believed him. He wasn't dealing with this on his own any more. They could do it together.

"So... you think Duane is behind this?"

"Duane and Sarah, yes."

"There was a note with the biscuits." Daisy activated her stunned limbs and grabbed it off the table to give to Tim.

"Shit, that's Sarah's writing! 'A sweet treat that will blow your mind!' That bitch!"

"Do you have any idea how this is possible,Tim?"

"I... I don't know, I mean... There are old legends of zombie curses being put on people. Shit, I knew Sarah was evil but I didn't think she was an actual witch! On account of not thinking there were any actual witches!" Tim paused, thinking.

"Oh my god, poor Mike! What are we going to do?" Daisy was looking at him, seemingly waiting for him to come up with a plan.

"Right. Let's assume this is a zombie curse. Whenever there was a curse in any of the old legends, there would also be an antidote, or a spell, or something to reverse it. We just have to find out what that is." There was a pause. Daisy was still watching him, awaiting instructions. Under intense pressure, Tim forced himself to focus and think back through his childhood comics, cult B-movies and Gothic horror novels. It had to be in there somewhere, oral ingestion of a poison that...

"Got it!" He yelled triumphantly. "Adam Shadowchild!"

"Who the hell is Adam Shadowchild?"

"He's one of the greatest science fiction and horror writers of our time! One of his early novels, 'Malevolent Sugar' concerned a zombie apocalypse brought about by deliberate cursing of selected individuals! It was a work of genius but, as he was undiscovered at the time, it never got the critical acclaim it deserved! That's not important, what is important is that the victims were captured by being tricked into eating cursed food! Always something they wouldn't be able to resist, something really nice, like..."

"Biscuits!" Daisy finished.

"Exactly!"

Tim disappeared into his room, closely followed by Daisy, and started rifling through his bookcase, chucking stuff out of the way onto the floor. He grasped an old leather-bound volume that was tucked down the back of the other books, brought it out, and blew dust from the cover.

"Here it is." Tim said reverently. Now, if I remember rightly, there was a spell to reverse the zombie curse, and it was laid out in detail..." He was flicking through the yellowed pages, eyes scanning. "Here!" He poured over the book, nodding firmly as he read the beginning of the spell.

"Uh huh." He murmured, concentrating.

"What does it say?" Daisy was practically bouncing up and down beside him, trying to get a look.

"Oooh!" He raised his eyebrows in surprise as he got half way down the page.

"What?" He ignored her, kept reading.

"Oh shit."

"What!"

He dragged his eyes up to meet hers.

"We've got some serious work to do."