Lockey vs. the Apocalypse | Book 1 | No More Heroes [Adrian's Undead Diary Novel] Meadows, Carl (book recommendations for teens TXT) 📖

Freya, not so much. She flinches as she’s pulling the trigger. She can use a handgun in a pinch and knows how to safely handle one, but this girl will never work out in the field. That’s okay. To be honest, she’d probably be a distraction for me as I’d worry about her constantly. She’s not cut out for this life and as resilient as she’s shown herself to be, she can take down zombies, but put her in the stress of being under fire and I think she’d crumble. Probably because she’s normal. Normal people don’t take to this stuff. They’ve got too much good sense.

Bancroft finally figured out to change the channel, but these things aren’t top dollar communications and with a bit of patient searching, you can find the band again. However, they’re obviously now keeping radio traffic to a minimum.

That changed last night.

We were sitting in the kitchen enjoying a post-meal coffee together, when the radio sat next to Nate blazed into life.

“Are you out there?” crackled a voice. It had to be Bancroft. Even his fucking voice sounded mean. “I’ll hang on for one minute more, then I’ll move up a channel.”

Nate reached for the radio, but as he operates in a different temporal phase to the rest of humanity and takes his sweet time, I snatched it up.

“I can hear you,” I said, overly jolly. Nate looked at me murderously. I grinned at him as I clicked the mic again and said in my best faux Texan accent, “Breaker one-nine, Rubber Duck, this is Sassy Kat, come back now.”

Honestly, I nearly pissed my pants laughing at Nate’s look of pure horror.

“Who the fuck is this?” Clearly, Mr. Bancroft was not amused.

“This is Sassy Kat with her toes on the bumper, Rubber Duck. What’s your twenty?”

Oh my god, I was already having too much fun.

“Are you the little bitch Lockey?”

“I told you, Rubber Duck, this is Sassy Kat. You sound like a Billy Big Rigger with some bubble trouble. You okay there, Rubber Duck? Your rig greasy side up?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he roared down the radio. “Shut the fuck up, I’m talking to you! Do you know who I am?”

“That’s a big negative, Rubber Duck. Say, you okay, Ducky? You forgotten?”

The signal went all weird for a minute, with a bunch of static, then went dead. I’m pretty sure in amongst that I heard an apoplectic rage as the mic was pressed for a second. I think I might have made him smash a radio in anger.

This was going well.

“What the fuck are you doing?” said Nate.

“You said he needs to get wild and erratic, and it seems like that legendary Bancroft temper runs true in the eldest as well. This guy isn’t used to people fucking with him, and you should know by now Nate, there is nobody on this earth that can be more annoying than me, especially when I try.”

Nate stayed silent for a few seconds as he considered that.

“Valid point,” he conceded.

I pulled the laptop in front of me. When we first went through it, we found all kinds of weird music downloaded on it. I found the track I wanted, prepped it, then waited.

The radio blared into life again, as we knew it would. Clearly Bancroft had found another handset.

“Listen to me, you little bitch. Are you still there?”

I promptly pressed play, stuck the handset next to the laptop’s speaker, and pressed down the talk button. Jamie Bancroft, local criminal kingpin and hard-man, was forced to listen to a good two minutes of soothing whale song over the airwaves, as I refused to release the mic. I heard nothing of his raging at the other end, but I knew it was happening. It’s my gift.

Freya was in hysterics, while Particles sat on the counter in front of her, staring at the laptop speaking whale with confused outrage. Even Nate’s granite face cracked into a smile.

When I thought the time was right, I paused the whale song and put on my best “children’s television presenter,” voice as I spoke into the handset.

“There, boys and girls,” I cooed. “Don’t we feel all relaxed and calmer now?”

Silence. He was catching on. The angrier he got, the more I fucked with him. The airwaves stayed silent for a couple of minutes.

“You killed my brother, and six more of my men,” he said finally. Flat. Calm. Detached. “That needs to be addressed.”

“Your brother implied I was going to be brought back to wherever it is you are, and then used as a whore, mate. We had a bit of a Han and Greedo situation, but your boy definitely moved to shoot. He was given fair warning and had his chance to walk away.”

“He was my brother.”

“He was a fucking caveman, and you know it,” I retorted. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be sending him out foraging with the Suicide Chavs. All those guns, Jamie, and you send your brother out with chavs armed with hammers and machetes? You know there’s an apocalypse, right?”

“He was my brother.” His voice was tight, straining at the chains of explosive fury.

“We’ve established that. And like I said, he could have walked away, but didn’t. If your brother was bacon, he’d be too fucking dumb to sizzle.”

“Be that as it may, things have got… tangled. We should meet to discuss a way forward out of this.”

I kept the mic open as I barked a derogatory laugh over the airwaves.

“Nate! Nate! Did you hear that? He wants us to meet him?” I laughed again. “Fucking hell, grab your dumbrella, it’s raining fucking stupid out there today.”

“When I get my hands on you, I won’t kill you, little whore,” he hissed. Man, this fucker was pure evil when the mask was stripped back. It wasn’t an act; if anything, the act was his everyday psychosis. When he got really mad, he got cold. “I’ll make sure every one of my guys takes a turn at you. Twice.”

“Cool story, bro,” I