Thrive | Season 1 | Episodes 1-5

by Lamb, Harrison J.

  The two men shared a disturbed look. There was nothing they could do for the poor woman, whatever it was they could hear happening.

  Dave turned the dial and the woman’s voice faded.

  “What on earth was that?” Leena poked her head into the study, having heard the radio from out in the hallway.

  Dave shrugged. “A transmission from abroad, by the sound of it. I don’t know what was happening on the other end but it didn’t sound good.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He continued to twist the dial in small fractions. “I’m going to keep searching. Maybe we’ll get something closer to home.” Kingsley remained in the study, his curiosity piqued despite the goosebumps that had appeared all along his arms. Soon both Emma and Brian crept into the room as well.

  And not a minute later, the radio speakers blared with a new voice – this one belonging to a soft-spoken man, telling of a community of survivors occupying the castle in the village of Sible.

  “There are over thirty of us here already,” the man said. “Carpenters, doctors, nurses, policemen, chefs, firefighters… people from all different backgrounds with different skills. Valuable skills. Since this started, I’ve seen people band together and help each other. I’ve seen people come to the aid of complete strangers. I always thought that desperate situations bring out the worst in human beings, but that isn’t always the case. Because when everything else is stripped away and the life you’ve always known falls apart, it forces you to ask what matters most to you. Forces you to change. And sometimes – maybe more often than we like to admit – that change is for the better.

  “What we’re trying to build here is a community of people who can learn and grow from the struggles we’ve all faced. We don’t just want to survive; we want to build a new world where we can thrive. And we’re inviting anyone listening to come and be part of that new world so we can win this war against the undead. I said it when I started this transmission, but in case you’ve just tuned in, we are at Sible Castle in Essex. I repeat, Sible Castle in Essex. I’ll be on here three times a day for the next week to relay this same message. Good luck out there.”

  8.

  Sible Castle was about a forty-minute drive away. And they had doctors there. As soon as the man on the radio had mentioned that, Kingsley’s mind had gone to Eric.

  Because he needed a doctor. It had been nearly a week and the co-amoxiclav wasn’t working. Perhaps they just needed different antibiotics to beat the infection, but the time it would take to loot a hospital or pharmacy for more was time Eric didn’t have. And then what if it didn’t help?

  Eric would stand a much better chance of survival if he could get treatment from a medical professional.

  Kingsley had already made his mind up. He told the others.

  Leena was shaking her head before he had finished. “That sounds like a terrible idea,” she said. “I’m sorry, but are you actually suggesting we throw away everything we have here to go sit on a rock and entertain the fantasy of a man we’ve never met? I’m surprised you’re even that quick to believe he was telling the truth. Because I think it’s just as likely that this community is really a group of maniacs selling hope to other survivors to lure them into a trap where they can kill them and steal everything they have. After all you’ve been through, I should think you would feel the same.”

  Kingsley thought about all the terrible things he’d seen people do; Darren shooting James, Mark trailing them for days to get his revenge and then brutally murdering Sammy, Rebecca and Kara.

  But he’d also seen people do good things; he thought about Emma saving a homeless man and his dog from the undead, and that same homeless man helping him find his friends, fighting side-by-side with him. He thought about Kara and Rebecca giving their lives in an effort to rescue Sammy, who they had only met a day prior.

  A week ago, Kingsley would have agreed with Leena. In fact, there was a part of him that still thought that way. Reluctant to place trust in the good nature of human beings, reluctant to hope. But it didn’t matter.

  Eric needs help.

  Kingsley sighed. “I understand where you’re coming from. You have a safe place here and a family to look out for, kids to care for. I get that. So I won’t ask anyone to come with me. But… if that man’s telling the truth about this community, you’d be a lot safer there with all those other survivors. And it’s not like this house is going to disappear; we can scout the castle out from a distance, and if it looks dodgy, we turn back.”

  He glanced at the others, hoping someone would voice their agreement. With or without them, Kingsley was going to that castle. But he’d rather not say goodbye to Emma a second time.

  Emma opened her mouth to say something but Leena piped up again before she could speak.

  “Look, I’ll be honest with you… I don’t trust you. You said you came back to Colchester because you didn’t know where else to go. But that’s bullshit, isn’t it? It’s obvious you still have feelings for my sister, and I bet you had it in your head that if you could protect her, you might earn her respect again. Maybe she would even forget what you took from her and fall in love with you all over again. Well, I’m here to tell you that—”

  “Stop,” Emma interrupted. Everyone looked at her.

  Staring her sister in the eye, she folded her arms and said, “Kingsley’s right. I think we should go with him.”

  Leena frowned. “What?”

  “This house won’t be safe forever. We need to stick together.”

  After several seconds of stunned silence, Leena’s lips pursed as if she was about to say something. But the words didn’t come out and instead she shook her head, turned on her heel and marched out of the room.

  Emma followed, hobbling after her sister on the ornate cane Brian had given her. Kingsley stared at the doorway and tried to make sense of what had just happened.

  *

  Hours later, Kingsley watched from the van as the others got into their vehicles. Leena, Dave and the kids in the SUV. Archie riding with Brian in his dark grey sedan.

  After Emma had talked her sister into coming with them, the only other person Kingsley had thought might resist the idea was Brian. The man had worked his arse off to get everything he had – his house, his land, his expensive car – and to say goodbye to all but one of those things, not knowing when, or if, he would ever see them again, was a decision Kingsley couldn’t imagine would be easy to make.

  However, Brian was far more comfortable losing all of his material possessions than he was with the prospect of being completely alone in the apocalypse.

  They had loaded the vehicles with all the supplies they had, including every weapon and every bottle, jar, flask and jug Brian had in the house, all of which had been filled to the brim with water from the kitchen tap.

  When everyone was ready, Kingsley did one last mental check that he hadn’t forgotten anything. Then he started the engine and led their little convoy out of the driveway and down the lane toward the A120, which they joined and then immediately exited north on to a string of back roads that would take them all the way to Sible, provided there were no blockages.

  As he drove, Kingsley snuck glances at Emma in the other seat who gazed out the window at the passing landscape showing the first signs of autumn.

  “Why did you want to come?” he asked her.

  Emma was silent for a moment. Then she turned and stared straight ahead through the windscreen. “As I said back there – you were right. Brian’s house won’t be a safe haven forever.”

  “But maybe Leena’s also right. Maybe these people at the castle aren’t what they say they are.” And I thought you hated me, he wanted to add.

  “I hope for all of our sakes she’s wrong.” Emma looked at him now. “We can’t lose trust in people. We can’t be the only good ones. Because if we are… I don’t know. I just don’t want to live in a world like that.”

  *

  The first thing that hit him as he opened
the shop door was the stench of a decomposing body. An indescribably pungent mixture of spoiled meat, faeces and rotten eggs. Kingsley didn’t think he would ever get used to that smell. It was like he could physically feel it crawling up his nostrils.

  They had stopped at a petrol station after detouring around a pack of snappers feasting on the carcass of a deer in the middle of the road, and he had come in here to see if he could get the pumps working; although the power had gone out in Colchester, there was a chance it hadn’t in this area.

  When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he noticed the body of a man on the floor between the back wall and some empty multipack crisp boxes. The corpse was bloated and stiff, his skin red with patches of blue and black, eyes bulging from their sockets. Flies buzzed around him.

  Judging from the black, desiccated blood spreading out from his head, Kingsley reckoned the man had died from head trauma.

  Covering his nose with his shirt, Kingsley slipped behind the till and tried the light switch. The lights didn’t turn on.

  No power, as expected. Still, Kingsley couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. He finished his perfunctory scan of the few items scattered around the dim shop and barged back outside, his eyes watering as he left the awful smell.

  “Any luck?” Emma asked. He shook his head no.

  She sighed. “Okay, looks like we’ll have to hop in with Brian then.”

  The butcher’s van had been running on fumes when they pulled up here; with no way of refuelling the van, it wasn’t going to get them all the way to the castle. They would have to leave it here.

  There was enough room in Brian’s sedan for the three of them. It was not a problem. Kingsley just hoped more than ever that this journey would be worth it now they’d lost a vehicle along the way.

  Just then a snapper jittered out from behind the car wash and came into the forecourt.

  “Fucking pests,” Kingsley muttered as he moved toward the zombie with his machete. He chopped at the snapper’s neck and almost took it’s head off in one go. It collapsed, it’s cleaved spine rendering it quadriplegic.

  Kingsley stared at the impotent snapper as he wiped blood off his cheek. Something bugged him about it’s appearance and he couldn’t figure out what it was… The skin of the person it had once been was going green and looked slightly waxy, but the body was nowhere near as rotten as the one he’d just found in the shop.

  That was it, he realised; why weren’t the snappers decomposing as fast as the countless dead bodies decorating every street and disused building?

  Of course it was possible that the snapper in front of him now had only recently turned, perhaps within the past few days. But all the snappers Kingsley had encountered looked no worse for wear than this one, except for those that were significantly mutilated.

  It pointed to a frightening possibility: the virus was preserving them.

  Maybe the snappers weren’t decaying because the virus, the disease, the parasite – whatever the fuck it was – kept their bodies from deteriorating so it could remain in the host for longer and have a better chance of spreading.

  Unsure why Kingsley was staring at the half-decapitated snapper, Emma came up beside him. “What is it?” she asked.

  He recalled the conversation he’d had with Kara in which she pointed out that the snappers were nothing more than walking corpses, and therefore their muscles and limbs would eventually succumb to decay, giving out and leaving them unable to stand. Unable to bite and infect. Harmless.

  But if something in them was indeed preserving their flesh, it might be a while before that happened.

  “Kingsley? What’s up?”

  He looked at her. “Err, nothing. I was just daydreaming.” He crouched next to the snapper and chopped into it’s skull to stop it’s jaw from wagging.

  9.

  The castle was on the north-eastern edge of Sible. Their brief detour took them around the eastern side of the village and directly on to the cottage-lined lane that led to the castle.

  As the survivors approached the turn on to the castle grounds – swerving past a trio of snappers that skulked out from a pub on their left, attracted by the noise of their engines – Kingsley was tense.

  They couldn’t see the castle from where they were as trees surrounded it. He hoped the man on the radio could be trusted. He hoped there would be doctors there that could help Eric. He hoped it would all work out for once.

  A flash of white caught Kingsley’s eye. Something between the trees on the right side of the road just ahead – the sign for Sible castle, he realised as they got closer. Except there was a white sheet draped over it with words spray-painted on it.

  Brian steered into the entry and Kingsley read the message: SURVIVORS HERE. ALL WELCOME.

  The two vehicles trundled up a gravel road with more trees on either side of them, the survivors itching to catch a glimpse of the castle. There was a slight curve in the road and when they turned along it, they could see a cluster of buildings in front of them.

  Then suddenly there was a break in the trees on their left and there it was – a hulking stone keep in the middle of a large clearing, with a turret jutting up from the nearest corner of its roof. A crumbling wall surrounded it.

  Brian slowed to a stop as a man and a woman walked out of the main L-shaped building in front of them and stood watching their approach. Various other people behind them had also stopped and were staring. Brian turned the engine off.

  Kingsley opened his door and got out, then the others followed suit. Only Eric and the children remained in the cars.

  The man from the L-shaped building stepped forward a few paces and flashed a broad, toothy smile at the survivors. He had short silver hair, a salt and pepper beard and sharp blue eyes.

  “Hello there,” he said. “How can I help you people?”

  “We heard your message on the radio,” Kingsley answered. “There are doctors here, right?”

  The man nodded. “There are, yes.”

  “My friend needs help from a doctor. He’s got an infection.”

  The man’s expression became more serious, and Kingsley jumped to allay the concern he knew he’d created by using the word infection.

  “It’s not a bite. Some other survivors attacked him and he suffered a stab wound which then got infected. I’d be extremely grateful if you could help him. We want to join your community. We’ll help out in whatever way you need.”

  The wide smile returned. “We’re always happy to take new people in. How many of you are there?” Kingsley suddenly recognised the man’s voice as the one who had been speaking on the radio.

  “Eight. Two kids and a dog.”

  “Great! There are quite a few kids here. Yours is the first dog we’ve had though. I’m sure you’ll all settle in well. I’m Scott, by the way.” He held out his hand. Kingsley shook it, then introduced himself and his friends.

  He couldn’t believe how good it was going.

  *

  Scott’s wife, Nicole – the woman who’d been standing next to him – was a nurse and she led them into the L-shaped building to a room where Eric could rest and be seen to by one of the two doctors in the community. Meanwhile, Scott took the rest of the newcomers on a tour of the place.

  As they crossed the bridge over what would have once been a moat but was now just a ditch, Scott waved to a man atop the castle wall overlooking the bridge; there was no gate and the wall had crumbled to the ground in some areas, but they had erected barricades out of furniture and reclaimed wood in those places and always had people on lookout duty.

  They could see now that there was a second corner turret on the roof of the keep opposite the one they had spotted driving in. In the safety of the wall, several tents had been pitched on the grass outside the keep. Survivors were everywhere – fixing the barricades, tending to seedling crops in grow beds, chatting, laughing, chasing children around the castle.

  Kingsley glanced at each of his friends’ faces and he knew they were
all as stunned as he was at how promising this community looked. It was amazing.

  Scott led them up the steps and into the keep; they entered on the first floor which, like the two floors above it, comprised one large square room. Colourful banners adorned the smooth stone walls alongside replicas of swords, shields, armour chest plates and helmets. Rustic wooden chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

  Some people clearly slept in here as there were mattresses and foldable camping beds laid out on one side of the room, tables and chairs on the other. Though it seemed most people opted for the privacy of a tent outside.

  The second floor was twice the height of the first – a great hall with a high gallery that ran the perimeter of the room. Just as Scott was about to take the survivors up to the gallery, a young black man emerged from the spiral stairwell and hurried toward them.

  “Scott,” he called out. “Something’s happening with the biters in the dungeon and I think you better see it.”

  “Can it wait, Asher? I’m showing the new people around.”

  “You really need to see it,” Asher said, shaking his head.

  Scott frowned and turned back to Kingsley. “Okay – hey, why don’t you guys come with me? I can show you the storeroom and the dungeon while we’re at it.”

  “Sure,” said Kingsley, surprised at how open Scott was with people he had only just met.

  Kingsley’s surprise must have registered in his voice because Scott then said, “We don’t hide things from anyone here. You’re part of our community now so you have as much right to know what’s going on down in the dungeon as I do.”

  As the group followed Asher down to the ground floor, Scott explained that someone in their community had had the idea to capture a pair of snappers – or biters, as they called them – and lock them in the dungeon so they could study the undead. Test their intelligence. See if starvation affected them.

  A few people had objected to the idea of keeping snappers within their walls. But the majority agreed that it was worth it if they learned something useful. So it was done.