Chapter Four – Playing House With a Human

Even though I kept telling myself not to stare, I didn't take my eyes off John for the entire night. I think a part of me was afraid that if I looked away he'd suddenly make a break for it. A stupid thing to be scared of, obviously. I'd only known this seemingly unremarkable human for a day and already I couldn't bear the thought of him leaving, however completely understandable his desire to leave was. After all, I was essentially just some strange corpse keeping him in a rundown flat on the wrong side of the river against his will for no good reason. Attempting to escape would be a perfectly sane thing for John to do. But, all the same, I couldn't bear it.

Daylight shone weakly through the dirty windows of 221B, and John stirred where he lay, curled up awkwardly on the threadbare armchair with the musty old duvet wrapped around him. He yawned, rubbed his eyes and then almost fell off the armchair in surprise when he saw me.

"Have you been watching me sleep all night?" he said, sounding croaky.

There was no point in arguing, so I just nodded. His shook his head at me.

"That's really creepy, you know?" he said, wincing as he stretched. "Why didn't you just go to sleep too?"

I narrowed my eyes at him as if it was completely obvious, which of course it was. "I... don't... sleep..."

"Right," he said, rubbing his left shoulder uncomfortably. "So you decided to just creepily watch me instead? How nice... and not at all unsettling. Does this flat of yours have a bathroom?"

I nodded, pointing towards the stairs which led up to the bathroom and second bedroom. I didn't go up there very often, so it was probably in an even worse state than the rest of the flat was. John got to his feet, groaning as he stretched and drawing my eyes irresistibly to his arms and his broad chest. Honestly, I have got to stop staring at him.

Once John had gone upstairs I got to my feet and looked out of the window. The streets were deserted but I knew it was only a matter of time until the corpses came out to shuffle around aimlessly for another tedious day. The putrid mush that was Sarah's brain was still in my pocket, and it was my best chance to learn more about John's life without actually having to ask. So, after checking over my shoulder to make sure John wasn't coming back down the stairs, I stuffed another handful of grey matter into my mouth.

Suddenly I was in some kind of playing area, the grass greener than I'd ever seen it, bright sunlight warming my skin. Sarah was only a child, and she was being pushed on the swings by someone who could only be her father, the two of them laughing happily.

Then the image changed. Sarah was older, but still only in her teens, and hiding from a group of corpses. With a horrible pang of recognition I saw that one of the corpses was Sarah's father, his eyes blank, his skin waxy, blood covering his mouth. The corpses merely stood there, staring and groaning at each other. Sarah wanted to reach out to her father, but another man held her back. The man – who was called Greg Lestrade – had greying hair and a steely glint of remorseless determination in his eye. He scolded Sarah for daring to look at the corpses as anything more than the vicious, diseased monsters they were. It didn't matter who they were when they were human, he said. They were flesh-eating zombies now, nothing more or less. And, to prove his point, he loaded his shotgun and fired into the group of corpses, hitting a small female one in the back of the head. The corpses turned, ready to attack, ready to defend themselves, the corpse of Sarah's father leading the charge. Lestrade forced the shotgun into Sarah's trembling hands and, with a feeling of overwhelming heartbreak, she blew her father's brains out.

The scene changed quickly. Sarah was slightly older, maybe in her early twenties, standing in an orderly row with others her own age. A younger John was standing beside her, handsome and broad shouldered, but frowning and rolling his eyes as Greg Lestrade paced in front of the group, explaining how it was their duty as some of the last remaining humans in the country to do all they could to protect mankind and rid the world of this zombie scourge. The young John looked as if he really didn't want to be there, but Sarah was filled with a vast sense of purpose as she took in to every word Lestrade said.

Just as soon as it started I was back in the room, looking out of the filthy window of my flat at the deserted street below. As I suspected, John had been taught to be mistrustful of corpses like me. He had been taught to hate us, to see us as monsters who deserved no pity or understanding, nothing but a bullet in the head. But, as I went over the memories I'd seen, it was Sarah who had believed it blindly and without question. John didn't seem to want to be there. John didn't seem quite as easily brainwashed. There was hope for him yet.

I turned slowly at the sound of John coming back down the stairs, irresistibly noticing that he had aged extremely well from the young man I had seen in my head. I really had to stop staring at him.

"That bathroom is disgusting," he muttered with a frown. "But I suppose you have no use for it. So have you figured out where I'm going to get any food? Since you're so insistent on keeping me here."

I hadn't even been thinking about it, but the answer came to me surprisingly quickly. The old sandwich shop downstairs had a store cupboard full of tinned food and bottles of water. Perfect.

"St-stay... here..." I stammered eventually. "I'll... b-be right... back..."

"You're leaving me alone?" he said, looking indignant at the idea. "Why can't I go with you?"

I shook my head. All this talking was exhausting. "Not... safe... st-stay... here... pl-please..."

John sighed and rolled his eyes, dumping himself down on the armchair he'd slept on and causing a cloud of dust to burst out of it. "Fine, but don't be long. I'm starving."

I nodded and shuffled out of the flat, making my way down the stairs as quickly as my annoyingly stiff legs would allow. The only remaining way into the sandwich shop was in through the broken glass of the front door, which was why I couldn't bring John along with me. It would be difficult to hide him from all the corpses that were already beginning to shuffle up and down the street.

I had hardly made it into the back room of the shop when I knew that I had made a mistake leaving John alone. He was going to try and escape, I just knew it, but there was no way he'd make it passed the front door with all the corpses outside. Don't ask how I knew all this – if anything, it was just a hunch – but I made it back outside in time to grab John and pull him behind a phone box.

"T-told... you..." I muttered, frowning at him. "Not... s-safe..."

"Right, yeah, I'm sorry," he said quickly, his eyes lingering on the corpses shuffling slowly up and down the street, far too close to where we were.

The easiest way back inside the shop and then back up to the flat was to not draw any attention to ourselves. I dipped my fingers into the congealed blood from yesterday's bullet wound and smeared it across his cheek again, making him recoil in disgust, but at least it made the smell of his living, beating heart a bit less obvious.

"Be... dead..."

He looked confused for a second, until I gave him a meaningful look and held my arms out stiffly in front of me.

"Oh, right! Okay."

We left our hiding place and slowly walked back towards the shop, John doing a ridiculously cartoonish impression of a corpse. "Too... much..."

He toned it down a bit and we managed to get inside the sandwich shop without any other corpses noticing us. Once we got to the back room John immediately began rooting through every cupboard, grinning broadly – beautifully – every time he found any food that hadn't gone stale and unopened bottles of drinking water.

"I wasn't trying to escape, you know," he said once we were back in 221B with all the food and water both of us could carry.

I looked at him in surprise as he cleared a space on the kitchen table to put all the food and then began searching the draws for a can opener.

"I was trying to help," he continued. "I didn't know how long you'd be or how far away you were going. If I knew you were just going downstairs, I would have stayed put. But I was starving and, no offence, but you don't move very quickly so I figured I could find something to eat a lot quicker."

He finally found a can opener, and turned to me with a smile that made my heart beat. "What I'm trying to say is I'm sorry. I didn't mean to worry you."

I really didn't know what to say to that, so I just nodded. But a sort of explosion was happening inside me, like happiness or something very similar to it. He didn't want to leave me. He didn't want to escape. It was amazing that only yesterday he was convinced I was going to kill him, but now it was as if he finally understood that I had no intention of hurting him. I didn't have to worry. I could see it in his eyes – in his beautiful blue eyes – that he wasn't going anywhere, at least not yet.

For the rest of the day we stayed in 221B. I watched him smile as he made himself a mug of tea with the teabags and powdered milk we found in the shop, watched as he looked through all the old books in the flat and admired the violin that I couldn't play. We listened to my records, and he didn't look quite so alarmed when he caught me staring at him. He asked me questions about myself, but quickly realised that there was virtually nothing about myself that I could remember, so instead he told me about his life on the other side of the river.

"It's kind of nice here actually," he said, sitting in the threadbare armchair opposite me as a Mozart symphony played in the background. "Back in the City it's always so stressful. We're living in a constant state of fear, but that's encouraged. Fear is what protects us. Fear is what keeps us alert. I don't remember the last time I could just sit and relax. It's just me and my sister, Harry, back in the City. We don't really get on so well, but we look out for each other. I hope she's okay. She's probably worried sick."

I looked away from him then. Guilt, that's what this feeling was called. There was no way that I could keep him here forever, not if he had family to go back to. Why did I have to be so selfish?

"It's weird, isn't it?" he said, making me looked back at him again. "Back in the City those in charge tell us not to think of you corpses as people. You're all just monsters, mindless zombies. But you were all people once. I mean, you had a name. You must have had family and friends and job and... a life. We act like we're the ones who had everything taken away from us, but at least we can remember who we are, at least we can remember what life was like before all this happened, at least we're not alone. I don't blame you for wanting to make a friend, for wanting to keep hold of a bit of humanity. And I must say, you've done a pretty good job of it. It sounds weird, but this hiding play of yours is sort of comforting, you know. It's like... a home."

Yet another heartbeat pounded singularly in my chest, and I tried my best to smile at him. Okay, maybe this wouldn't be so terrible. This could just possibly be the best and worst decision I had ever made. I'd probably regret this once it was over, but who's to say I couldn't enjoy it in the meantime? There was so little in my tedious half-life that made me feel anything even close to happiness. Yet I had felt more in one day with John than I had ever done since I technically died. It was foolish of me to do this, but I would be an even bigger fool not to savour every single second.

Look at me, coming over all sentimental.

Once again I have no clue when I'm going to be able to update this. A combination of a lack of internet and severe case of writer's block. But I shan't leave you hanging, Humble Readers. This fic will be finished at some point, I promise. It may take a while, but it will be done.

xxx