Can I do this?
She didn’t need to do anything, she realized. The ball would take care of everything for her. The mere fact of her indecision was forging her decision.
A tendril of red, like a protruding tongue, wormed from that great bulb, turning the light first pink, then vibrant red. Cathy’s hand scrabbled and found the door handle, pulling it open and shoving it open. Her girls looked up as she fell into the mud and kicked her door shut.
The rain was still falling and distant cars honked their horns. Not only at her, but others. None of it mattered.
The light from her beaten-up old wreck pulsed and grew stronger. Others stepped from their cars and watched the thrumming red glow pulse faster and faster like a giant’s heart.
Her little girls, invisible within it save for their tiny hands pressed against the glass. The expressions on their faces were of bitter disappointment. They were no longer thrilled and enchanted by the light, but terrified and uncertain of it.
Blood ran from the girls’ noses, ears, and mouths. They breathed in some kind of gas and shuddered and shook under its throes.
“I’m sorry!” Cathy cried. “I’m sorry!”
She didn’t want to watch, but she couldn’t turn away either. She was ashamed to admit she didn’t once consider opening a door and rescuing her kids.
Her little girls flopped down onto the backseat. The light began to fade, folded back in on itself, leaving only purple patches in viewers’ eyes.
A man approached Cathy’s car.
“Don’t open the door!” a woman further down the queue of cars said. “It’s one of those things, isn’t it? One of those orbs? I saw it on the internet. Don’t open the doors or they’ll come out.”
“What will?” the man said.
“Monsters. Don’t do it. They’re dead already. We will be too if you open those doors.”
“They’re only little girls—”
“They were little girls. They’re not anymore.”
The woman was so certain, the man no longer argued. No one moved to open the doors of the beaten up old car. Especially not when figures of little girls began to stir against the glass, and everyone could see, like a display at the zoo, the dangerous creatures on full display.
58.
GARDENING WAS Agnes’s pleasure and obsession. It got her outside, breathing fresh air, and she liked to get her hands dirty in the soil. There was nothing quite like the aroma and feel of fresh peaty soil. She spent an hour a day in her little allotment. Two hours, when the weather was good.
She took a moment to remind herself how lucky she was to be out here, toiling. She looked out on the small tuft of petunias she’d planted a month earlier. They were already coming in, petals broad and wide to absorb the sun as it arched overhead. A thin wisp of red hung low over the bright petals that caused Agnes to frown.
She stabbed the fork in the soil, dusted off her hands, and slowly got to her feet. She stumbled slightly, putting her hands to her aching back. As good as gardening was to her wellbeing, it wasn’t too good for her back. She shuffled over to her petunias.
The sunlight glinted off a discarded shard of metal half-buried in the soil.
Damn kids, she thought. They never respected other people’s things, never respected nature’s beauty. She bent down to extract it from the earth. Her hand never reached it. She’d entered the red haze had hung low over it. She batted her nose and pulled away from it instinctively. She’d never been a hayfever sufferer but this must have been what it felt like.
She coughed to dislodge what was in her throat. Then her throat began to close up. She could hardly breathe as the sinister red dust entered her system. She stumbled and collapsed.
Her body shook and she clawed at her throat. The red mist hung thickly over her as her heart ceased and she stopped struggling.
Her beloved nature was at peace once again. And then she began to stir.
59.
AN ORB SAT in the bottom of the pool. Water flowed through the system, entering miniature holes and passing through to the other side.
“Well well. What do we have here?”
A worn hand reached in and extracted the orb. A squinting eye appraised it. A finger traced the edge that ran around it.
“What you got there?” a second man said.
“Dunno. Some sort of metal ball.”
“Metal ball? Let’s have a look.”
He handed it over.
“Any idea what it is?” he said.
“People throw out all kinds of junk. Where’d you find it?”
“Right here. Jammed in the filter.”
“That’s what the filter’s for. Stops crud like this getting through.”
“What shall I do with it?”
“Toss it. Nobody’ll miss it.”
The man tossed the ball in the garbage.
Neither man knew what it was, what the orb was capable of. It was now an empty husk. The virus had already seeped out.
Within twenty minutes, the locals at the towns served by the filtration system would be returning home for showers, cooking, washing their dishes, and turning on their lawn sprinkler systems.
Water gave life. It could also take it away.
60.
DAMO WAS surprised by the kindness of strangers. Despite the horror movies and extreme warnings of altruistic wayfarers aiding those who hiked, one car after another stopped to give him a lift. One even offered him a bed for the night in a spare room.
Exhausted and with no other plans, it was an offer he couldn’t pass up. When he got to the lady’s home, he met her husband, who was just as kind as his wonderful wife. They cooked him a meal, asked him about where he was heading and what he planned on doing when he got there. They suggested he stay with them as long as he needed.
Damo thanked them but told them he would only stay for a nap before hitting the road again. With his current spate of bad luck, he didn’t wish to bring anything terrible down on these good people.
He’d planned to sleep one hour and ended up sleeping four. He took a shower, using one of the couple’s fluffy towels to dry himself with. They cooked him another hot meal. The wife also prepared him a packed lunch. Then the husband gave him a lift into town.
“A bit of a to-do here earlier,” the husband said. “They shut down the roads and forced everyone to stay in their homes.”
“Why?”
“Some sort of military exercise. Involving the spread of a new virus. I don’t know. Probably the media overhyping things as usual. They’ve sorted it out now.”
He pointed out the train and bus station, to which Damo chose the latter.
Damo opened his wallet. He fancied he saw a moth fly out of it.
“I don’t have much,” he said. “What I do have is yours.”
“Keep it. Your money is no good here.” The smile beneath his bushy mustache was bursting with warmth. “Good luck on your travels.”
“Thank you.”
He couldn’t squeeze all his appreciation into those two meager words. He got out of the car and crossed the road to the bus station. He looked up at the posters of the various potential destinations—amazing cities he’d only ever seen and heard about on radio and TV.
New York. Washington D.C. Las Vegas. Los Angeles. Boston.
Perhaps he’d get to see them all one day. For now, he needed to choose one. He tossed a coin, playing a little winner-stays-on game with Fate, letting her tell him where he would be going.
New York.
He checked the prices and realized he didn’t have enough to get him there. He flipped his coin again, and this time chose somewhere a little closer to home: Memphis. He could work and save up to reach New York if he wanted to. He felt a freedom he had only ever dreamed about until then.
He needed to wait an hour before his bus would leave. When it came, he chose a window seat. He leaned his head against it and shut his eyes. He fell asleep.
It was getting dark when he woke up. The
bus’s overhead lights were on and Damo had to get off. He then had to wait three hours for his next bus. He wasn’t the only one waiting.
He plucked up the courage to speak to a girl a few years younger than himself. He asked where she was heading. She informed him she was going to Memphis too. A lull in the conversation prodded Damo to ask if she’d like to eat something. She smiled and said she would.
They found a 24-hour diner. Damo ordered the biggest meal he could afford. He didn’t know when he would get to eat another one. The girl—whose name was Wynette, after the singer—ordered a single sandwich and a cup of black coffee.
“Why are you going to Memphis?” Wynette asked. “There are plenty of other, bigger places out there people usually go.”
“I wanted to see as many places as I can on the way to New York,” Damo said, fully aware of his lie.
“Cool.”
He’d passed the test.
They talked about their dreams, the future, and what they hoped would happen one day. Wynette mentioned she’d had a very stressful day and was looking forward to making a change in her life. Neither of them spoke about where they’d come from. For the first time that day, Damo began to feel like things were looking up.
They headed back to the station and waited the remaining twenty minutes for their coach to turn up. It came thirty minutes late. They climbed on and took seats across from one another. That was how they slept, smiling at each other across the aisle, legs curled up beneath them.
When they arrived, they both yawned and stretched. Wynette gave Damo her number.
“Call me when you get settled,” she said. “We can keep a check on each other. Make sure we follow our dreams.”
They said goodbye and Damo was at a loss for what to do and where to go next.
He found another 24-hour diner—they were fast becoming his favorite places—and bought a copy of the local rag. He turned to the apartment listings and went through them one by one. He’d need to break a few dollars, get some coins, and find a payphone. He couldn’t afford to waste money buying a phone with a data plan yet.
It was while he sat in that diner, smiling to himself about the potential the future might hold when he heard the first explosion. The lights flickered before coming back on again.
“Earthquake?” Damo said to a waitress.
“We don’t get big quakes here,” she said.
Outside, dogs barked and distant car alarms blared. Then came another explosion. The diner shuddered. Cups and plates smashed on the floor. The waitress screamed. Damo swallowed his own.
He left a couple of dollars on the table and moved outside. He stood in the chill of the night, listening to a scream erupt somewhere to the left. Unseen. And then another scream, from the right this time.
Then another scream, and another. With each second that passed, the screams became thicker, louder, overlapping until they became a single cacophonous shriek.
As thick and fast as they’d come, they began to fade again, replaced this time by silence. The diner’s patrons and workers exited the diner and stood on the sidewalk beside Damo. No one said a word. The silence was more deafening than the screams.
Then he heard that noise.
The groans began as the screams had, slow and hesitant. They would grow, he knew, into a terrifying crescendo. The waves of droning undead grew deeper as figures shuffled from the darkness and into the light.
“Oh my God,” one of the patrons said.
“What are those things? You don’t suppose they’re what everyone’s been talking about?”
“I’ve got to get home to my kids,” the waitress said.
She turned and ran. It made no difference to the Damo. His spirit had been broken. Three times he’d brushed into these things. Three times they’d had their chance to get him. He’d come to this city to begin again, to begin anew. A brand-new start. Instead, it was to be his end.
The diner patrons and employees ran. Damo didn’t take a single step. Fate had sent him here. This was his destiny.
“So be it,” he said.
He shut his eyes, held out his arms, and let them come.
A Gift
I hope you enjoyed Zombie State. I’m currently working on the next book, Zombie Nation. Until then, why not check out the first book in my completed series After the Fall. It follows a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world forced from the safety of their commune. They embark on a journey that reveals a startling secret that promises to change the fate of the human race forever. Find the opening few chapters below. Details of how to grab the whole book are available afterwards.
THE COMMUNE
AFTER THE FALL | BOOK ONE
-EXCERPT-
CHARLIE DALTON
PROLOGUE
AN ESTIMATED one hundred and fifty million meteorites and asteroids inhabit our solar system. Adrift, aimless.
They’re made of metal, rock or ice, the left-over remnant debris from the birth of our solar system. Some are as large as dwarf planets, others smaller than your fist. They bump and cajole one another in the protective Oort Cloud playschool, disrupting their eternal slumber.
Occasionally, one gets knocked hard enough to be ejected from the asteroid nursing ground and toward the centre, toward the distant point of motherly light we refer to as our Sun.
One hundred and sixty-five million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid exploded with the force of anywhere between twenty-one and nine hundred billion Hiroshima A-bombs. Most asteroids aren’t of supermassive size. Most are much smaller and bombard the Earth at regular intervals.
As the largest country in the world, Russia has experienced more than its fair share of meteorites. The most recent recorded event occurred on 15th February 2013. Many more instances go unobserved.
Not all theories suggest a payload of death. There is also the theory of Pan Spermia whereby life was brought to our young planet just when the conditions became conducive to life. Another planet, far from our world, could have been destroyed, its debris cast into the universe, a billion pieces of cosmic lint flung into the extremities of space. We may, in essence, all of us, be aliens.
Meteorites may have seeded us with life. It’s therefore a peculiar twist of fate it was by meteorites that we were almost wiped out.
Yet not in the way anyone might have ever suspected.
1.
THE DESERT was silent and calm, the way Jimmy had always known it. The only noise came from the gentle rattling of the goats’ bells around their necks and their soft mehing of content.
Jimmy could already feel himself beginning to drift off to the land of Nod. His head would fall in the middle of his dinner plate. His mother would not be pleased.
Jimmy, eight years old and small for his age, turned in his deckchair to look at Billy the Kid—the billy goat that’d been born just a few months ago—but was already the boy’s favorite pet.
The family didn’t keep a dog, no matter how much Jimmy argued for its case. “But he could run and catch rabbits! Could keep an eye out for Rages!”
But his parents were adamant. No dogs.
Jimmy glanced at his parents. They were discussing something. How to grow or find more food, probably. It was the subject that dominated most of their conversations these days.
Jimmy tucked some of the lettuce in his pocket—a weak, pathetic excuse for a lettuce leaf that had no place on a dinner plate, full of holes from the caterpillar infestation they’d suffered during the last cycle. It was all they had, and they were thankful for it.
Jimmy finished up the last of his beans, spooning them into his mouth as fast as he could.
“Done,” he said.
“Wash your plate up in the sink,” his mother said.
She sat with Jimmy’s only sibling in her lap, a pink cretin of six months. When he’d come, he’d taken every last morsel of time that had previously been his. And to think, he’d originally been excited at the prospect of a new little baby brother or sister.
&nb
sp; Another disappointment.
Never mind. Jimmy had many other siblings. Billy the Kid was only the most recent addition. Jimmy was close to animals. Perhaps too close.
His first animal friend, Percy, was a pig with a black spot on his left ear. He’d have been close to ten years old by now if the boy’s parents hadn’t been so hungry. They’d held off for as long as they could, stripping the bark off the trees and consuming every edible flower and plant within a five-mile radius, but eventually, they had no food for themselves, never mind the pig. They couldn’t even give the pig their poo any longer.
No food, no poo.
They’d slaughtered the starving little piglet. There had been precious little meat on his bones, but his mother was nothing if not creative, and made the little body last two weeks before they became crazy with hunger again.
Finally, the drought ended and the rain fell. Jimmy had danced in the heavy shower along with his parents. The plants grew back faster after that.
Jimmy washed his plate in the water that had sat there all week. He didn’t think it was much good cleaning it in dirty water, but he washed it anyway and slid it into the dish rack his father had made out of twigs from the elder bush at the back of their home.
Before the Fall, Jimmy’s father had been something called a lawyer. No matter how many times his father explained the concept to him, Jimmy couldn’t understand what a lawyer actually did.
There wasn’t much work for lawyers these days. Or for the past twenty years. The Fall had changed everything.
There was a time when Jimmy’s father couldn’t do DIY, but over the years his skills had improved and he knew which end of the hammer to use.
That was his father’s expression. Which end of the hammer to use. Jimmy didn’t understand that, as it was obvious to him which end should be used.
Death Squad (Book 2): Zombie State Page 15