Zom-B Chronicles II by Darren Shan

Author:Darren Shan [Shan, Darren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471124587
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

FOUR

I’m in shock for ages. To go from thinking you have only months to live, to being told you might be hanging around for a couple of millennia . . . it’s a cataclysmic leap and my mind whirls as we continue the tour.

We visit a kitchen where a good-looking, stylishly dressed woman with a big smile is scraping brains from inside severed human heads and dumping them in a mixing bowl. Dr Oystein introduces us, but I forget the woman’s name even before we leave the room.

‘Some of the heads are delivered to us from people who die of natural causes in human compounds,’ he says. ‘We have contacts among the living who view us as allies, and they give us what they can. But most come from fresh corpses that we found in morgues or dug up not long after the first zombie attacks. I knew brains would be a pressing issue, so I made them my number-one priority. For a couple of weeks, grave-robbing was practically our full-time occupation.’

He tells me how he’s trying to create a synthetic substitute that will give us the nutrients we need, so that we don’t have to rely on reaping brains from dead humans in future, but I’m barely listening.

More bedrooms, another training centre – again, I only spot teenagers – and the impressive council chamber. Dr Oystein starts waffling on about the history of County Hall, but I can’t focus. I keep thinking about the centuries stretching out ahead of me, the incredibly long life that has been dropped on me without any warning.

Halfway down another of the building’s long corridors, I stop and shake my head. ‘This is crazy,’ I shout. ‘You’re telling me I’m gonna live at least twenty times longer than any human?’

‘Yes,’ Dr Oystein says calmly.

‘How the hell can anyone last that long?’

He shrugs. ‘A living person could not. But we are dead. We do not age as we used to. If we take care of our bodies, and sustain ourselves by eating brains, we can defy the laws of living flesh.’

‘Then what’s to say we won’t live forever?’ I challenge him. ‘Where did you pull two or three thousand years from? If we don’t age –’

‘We do age,’ he cuts in smoothly. ‘I said that we do not age as we used to, but we definitely age, only at a much slower rate. Our external appearance will not change much, except for scarring, wrinkling and discolouring. Our internal organs are to all intents and purposes irrelevant, so even if they crumble away, it won’t really matter.

‘Only our brains are susceptible to the ravages of time. From what my tests have revealed, they are slowly deteriorating. If they continue to fail at the rate I have noted in the subjects that I have been able to assess, we should manage to hold ourselves together for two or three thousand years. But it could be less, it could be more. Only time will tell.’

I shake my head again, still struggling to come to terms with the revelation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.