Death & the City Book Two by Lisa Scullard Page B

lapping around me, now on the edge of hearing as she swamps me in a bear-hug. I'm not sure I approve of balaclavas in school, particularly with Tru-3D dark glasses and a harmonica stuck in her mouth, so that she resembles a jolly knitted Bender the Robot from Futurama toy. She spits the harmonica into my hand, and gives me a kiss hello.
    "I got one of my Zombies into the relay race and my best Zombie won a cooking competition," she announces. "Hendry in my class told me a cheat, where if your Zombie can't find or buy any special ingredients, you make him take off his own foot, make a stew out of it, and it wins! And my other Zombie went to aerobics, and the winner is the one with the least amount of bits fallen off when the music stops. I'm still practising sticking them back on quick enough. I put an arm where its head should be, and its head sticking out of its bottom, so I lost. Can you buy me some chewing gum, please?"
    "Sure," I say, putting my arm around her and glad to be back in a world I understand, the gossip left behind us as we head out of the playground. "How was the rest of your day?"

    Comfortably armed with chewing gum, milkshake and the promise of Chinese takeaway for dinner, Junior tucks herself up in bed telling me she has worked out that her Zombies will come for a bath if she shouts 'Eat brains!' pretending to feed them, meaning their spare parts last longer. And one of them has been given X-ray vision by the Mad Scientist when it went to have its undercarriage bolted back on, meaning it can now see hidden keys to locked rooms and bonus levels in the haunted house, which have been swallowed by other Zombies.
    I'm glad to hear there is a way of fixing the ongoing problem of the lost undercarriage. I remember her getting extremely vexed at Christmas when Zombie Pets Babies arrived, and she kept yelling "It says 'Undercarriage Dropped Out' and won't let me stick it back on, and now my Zombie can only go around commando on his elbows!" convinced that the game was faulty.
    Apparently 'undercarriage' is the important bit connecting the spine to the legs. Pelvis, in human terms. Apart from the terminology, I view it as quite an educational piece of software.
    While she's happy and not demanding dinner yet, I do a bit of knitting and review my recent diary. The unseen link in recent events that I'm looking for isn't there. In fact I'm startled how sane and normal my writing sounds, from the point of view of looking for evidence of something like that.
    I have a browse through my textbooks looking for references to post-traumatic stress disorder , trying to identify with Warren's perspective, but find I've got very little, just a mention under a heading on borderline personality disorder . I'll have to remedy that and go to the bookshop and find something. I do have a quick flick through some old memoirs of the French Foreign Legion that a library was nice enough to give me, having put them away in the basement as books no longer requested, but post-military PTSD didn't seem to exist back then, a century or so ago. Legionnaires built roads, had prostitutes on tap, travelled the world, and pretty much did as they pleased, with fond memories of such - while avoiding traditional things like marriage, inheriting an uninspiring family business, or vagrancy. And they hunted down deserters, pretty much relentlessly. In one of my books, a deserter was returned to serve his sentence after a chance sighting in Paris, twenty-one years after doing a bunk. It sounded as though the FFL was something you signed up for as a result of PTSD and antisocial personality disorder from the trials of everyday life, then gained a new identity as a Legionnaire and recovered - not the other way around.
    The other thing bothering me is what Warren referred to as the first contingent . The ones looking for alternatives to getting old and sick in the current climate, who the opposing contingent are saying goes against nature. I consider the