There's a long silence while I come to terms with what I've been told. This is certainly a meeting to remember. It's not every day that you find out you've got less than two years to live, and by the way, you've been feasting on human brains for the past month. But after my initial shock it doesn't take me long to get a handle on myself.
"Where do the brains come from?" I ask.
Burke says, "I told you - humans."
"I mean, are you killing people in order to feed us?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Dr. Cerveris snorts.
"The casualties have been horrendous," Josh explains. "We can't put an exact figure on how many people have been slaughtered, but in London alone we reckon it must run into the millions."
"That's not including the hundreds of thousands who have been turned," Dr. Cerveris points out. "Just those who were killed, whose heads were cracked open, so that they couldn't revive."
"We've mopped up a lot of the corpses," Josh continues. "Reviveds rarely clean out a skull - they almost always leave bits of brain behind. Ever since we realized what revitalizeds need, we've been collecting brain matter and storing it."
There's silence again. I stare at the wall above Burke's head. This wasn't how I saw my life going when I was at school. I didn't have any great career plans, but cannibalism was very far down my list of options.
I chuckle drily and lower my gaze. "You know what?" I grin crookedly. "Sod it. I always wanted to go on a TV show and eat things like bugs, snakes, roadkill. This is a dream come true. Bring it on. I'll eat whatever the hell you chuck at me." I rub my stomach slowly. "Yum."
Burke smirks. "I told them you were a piece of work." He glances at Josh. "I bet you're glad now that you listened to me."
"We'll see," Josh mutters. "She hasn't agreed to cooperate yet."
I frown, thinking back a few minutes, then turn to Burke. "Josh said it was thanks to you that I wasn't still a zombie. What did he mean?"
"I was coming to that before you sidetracked me." Burke crosses his hands on the table and looks at me seriously. "Revitalizeds need brains to thrive. If we don't feed them, they regress. In most cases, the staff here let that happen."
I cock my head sideways. "Come again?"
"The percentage of reviveds who revitalize is minuscule," Dr. Cerveris says defensively. "But if you take a group of hundreds of thousands, even a fraction of a percent is significant."
"I figured there must be more of us," I say slowly, "that adults and younger kids were being held elsewhere."
"Of course," Dr. Cerveris says. "We keep a sample of all age groups, races, both sexes."
"A sample," I repeat, knowing what that must mean but waiting for them to confirm it.
"They let most revitalizeds regress," Burke says. His gaze hasn't wavered. "They separate the conscious zombies, hold them in a cell, don't feed them, then return them to the general holding pens once they've - "
" - lost their bloody minds!" I roar. I try to jump to my feet but the chains around my ankles hold me in place.
"There are limits to the numbers we can maintain," Dr. Cerveris says calmly.
"Bullshit!" I retort. "You just don't want the hassle."
"We only need a few to study and help us with our experiments," Josh says. "What would we gain by keeping the others?"
"They can think!" I scream. "They're people. They have rights."
"Rights?" Josh sneers. "Only the living have rights, and they're not alive, not really. You aren't either. You're a freak revived, nothing more, a threat to any normal person, never more than a few skipped feeds away from insane savagery. We keep you because we need you, but you have no rights. You lost those when you died and became a killer."
"Is that how you think too?" I ask Burke, trembling with rage.
"No," he says. "To me it's abhorrent."
"Then how can you work with them?" I snarl. "Why do you put up with this crap? Why not walk away, like anyone halfway human would?"
Burke shakes his head and doesn't reply.
"I wouldn't be so quick to criticize your old teacher if I were you," Dr. Cerveris says smoothly. "You'd be back stewing with the reviveds if it weren't for Billy Burke."
"We run a background check on every revitalized," Josh says. "We like to know who they are, where they came from. We gather as much information as we can before deciding how to process them."
"I bet that's so you can give priority to family members or people related to politicians or powerful businessmen," I sneer.
Josh shrugs. "I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a consideration, but that's the way the world has always worked. Nepotism is rampant everywhere. But if it's any consolation, very few revitalizeds fall into that bracket, so it's rare that someone is sacrificed at the expense of a minister's son or a billionaire's daughter."
"When they ran a check on you," Burke says, "they discovered your connection to me. I'm a consultant, like I told you. I've been working with the army, helping deal with undead children who are finding it hard to cope. Most are distraught at having lost family and friends. They don't all adjust as swiftly as you have."
"More's the pity," Dr. Cerveris murmurs. "Our lives would be a lot simpler if every revitalized were as cold and uncaring as Becky Smith."
I look at the doctor with contempt. "Screw you, numbnuts. I care. You don't understand me at all, do you?"
"That's why I've been kept busy," Burke says as Dr. Cerveris scowls at me. "I do understand, or at least I have a good idea. I never thought of it as a gift, being able to relate to teenagers, but it seems that talent is rarer than I believed. If it weren't for me and a few others, you guys would have been branded as cattle and treated the same way."
"I don't think we'd have gone quite that far," Josh smiles frostily. "Anyway, we realized you were one of Billy's ex-students, so we asked him if he wanted us to approve you for sustained revitalization."
"And you said yes." I flash my teeth at Burke in a mock smile. "Thanks. You're my hero."
"It wasn't as simple as that," Burke says quietly. "I had to pitch for you. I told them you were tough, smart, determined, that you'd be an asset."
"In short," Josh snaps, "he told us you'd fit in perfectly with the zom heads, that if we wanted someone to carry out harsh but essential tests on reviveds, you were our girl. That's why we spared you. Otherwise..." He puts a finger to the side of his head, twirls it round and makes loony eyes at me.
"Nice to know you think so highly of me," I snarl at Burke.
"Would you rather I'd let you revert?" he asks gently. "Should I have abandoned you and left you to rot?"
I frown uncertainly. I can see where he's coming from, but still...
"You had no right to promise on my behalf," I mutter. "You shouldn't have told them I'd be willing to torture people - "
"Zombies," Josh slips in.
" - and kill them," I finish.
"I know," Burke says. "But I figured if they kept you alive, at least you'd have the chance to make that decision yourself. You're faced with a choice, B. It's not a welcome choice, and I honestly don't know how I'd react in your place, but it must be better than having no choice at all."
"And that choice is...?" I challenge him.
"Do what they ask and stay on as a zom head," he says evenly. "Or refuse to do their bidding and become a senseless zombie again."
"Not much of a choice, is it?" I huff.
"No," he admits. "But if you choose to defy them, at least you'll give up on consciousness willingly. The other way, you'd have simply regressed without any understanding of why it was happening to you."
"So I can become a vicious mercenary or a brain-dead cannibal. That's what you're telling me?"
"Boiled down to its basics, yes," Burke says.
Josh coughs politely. "I don't see any point in taking this conversation further. You know where you stand, Becky. It's time to decide. Will you help us or do we send you back to the pens?"
I stare at the three men, thinking hard. I'd like to say it's an easy choice, but it's not. I want to do the right thing and toss their offer of cooperation back into their ugly, cynical faces. I want to stand tall and proud like a hero, face true death willingly, without any regrets.
But at the same time I don't want to fade away and become a brainless member of the walking dead. They're going to carry out their experiments with or without me. Why not play along and cling to the semblance of life that I have? It wouldn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things.
When we did history at school and studied the Nazis, I was always scornful of the collaborators, those who morally objected to the cruelties but went along with them anyway, guards at death camps, doctors who were asked to experiment on live subjects, tailors who made clothes for soldiers, factory workers who provided them with guns. I thought they were cowards. There was no doubt in my mind that I'd have refused to help the Nazis just to save my neck.
Now I realize it's not that simple. If it's put to you plainly, cooperate or die, it's impossible not to have doubts. Maybe a saint would shake her head and refuse to consider the possibility of collusion, but I'm no saint. Hell, I'm not even halfway human.
But I've experienced firsthand the dreadful consequences of meekly obeying people who are rotten to the core. Tyler's face flashes through my thoughts, as it does a dozen times a day, and I hear his cries again as the zombies bit into his flesh, see the pleading look in his eyes as he desperately begged me to save him. When I jumped at my dad's command and threw Tyler to the zombies, didn't I become a collaborator of sorts, as guilty as anyone who served the Nazis?
The man I helped kill today meant nothing to me. I didn't know him, wasn't connected to him, probably had little in common with him. Maybe he was a brute who deserved to die. But even if that was the case, he had a place in this world, a stake to existence, and I took that away from him. I vowed, after throwing Tyler to the wolves, that I'd never do it again. If I'm to honor that vow, I've got to treat everyone the same, not pick and choose those who count and those who don't. No collaboration, not if it costs me what little might be left of my soul.
"I won't do it," I moan, staring miserably at the table. "You're a pack of jackals and I won't join your sick, screwed-up cause, even if you kill me."
"Oh, we won't kill you," Dr. Cerveris says. He leans across the table and stares at me coldly. "We have a far more fitting punishment for obstinate hypocrites like you. Nil by mouth. This time next week, when your brain has turned to mush, you'll eat your own mother if we set her before you."
"And who knows," Josh purrs menacingly, in what I can only pray is nothing more than a nasty little dig, "maybe we will...."