After The Zombies | Prequel | After The Zombies

by Steel, Amanda

  ‘What the hell is that?’ she finally managed to ask.

  ‘An axe, I cut the handle down, so it's easier to carry and run with. Get them in the head and try not to get too close to their mouths.’

  'This way.' Luke grabbed Grace's arm and led her away. 'We don't want to fight them unless we have to.'

  Grace wasn't sure she wanted to fight at all, but decided she didn't want to become like them either. As the two of them ran farther away from the centre of Manchester, Grace tried not to look at the bodies and the people who shouldn't be capable of walking around in the state they were in.

  'Shit,' Luke muttered.

  Grace saw what caused him to swear. There must be at least ten of them approaching in a group, she calculated.

  ‘Remember to aim for the head,' Luke said as he fired off a shot, hitting one in the head. The creature fell to the ground.

  'I thought you said we shouldn't fight,' Grace reasoned, still clutching her axe.

  'Unless we have to and we have to,' Luke insisted as he fired again.

  Grace came face to face with one. She had to make a split-second decision to fight or die. She had been ready to accept that she might die from sleeping rough during the winter, but getting eaten seemed so much harsher. She swung the axe. It sliced into the skull of the thing which had once been a man. He fell to the floor with the axe still lodged into his head. Another one approached her. She tried to pull the axe out, so she could use it again. It was stuck and no amount of pulling released it.

  'Oh crap,' Grace yelled, hoping those wouldn't be her last words. She heard another gunshot, but it wasn't aimed at the one almost within biting distance of her. 'Luke,' she screamed as she smelt the rotting flesh, reminding her of the bins she sometimes had to scavenge through for food — only worse. She tried to push away the thing trying to bite her. It was no use; his teeth were getting closer to her face. Grace cried out, sure that she was about to die. She watched as blood oozed out of the thing's head and saw her own axe slice through its head. She looked up expecting to see Luke, but instead there was a dark-haired man standing above her.

  ‘This yours?’ He held out the axe which Grace accepted, then he helped her to her feet. She nodded dumbly before he told her, ‘slice straight through, it gets stuck otherwise.’

  ‘Okay.’ She nodded again.

  Her rescuer barely had time to introduce himself as Mark, before another larger group of the creatures approached. Grace, Luke and Mark ran, knowing that they were outnumbered and wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Chapter three

  The night before Grace’s first day at work, she decided to get an early night. She managed to push over the wardrobe, alternating between pushing and dragging it the short distance to the door. It wouldn't keep out a large horde of the infected, but the noise would wake her in time to retrieve the axe from the drawer under her divan bed.

  The government insisted the events which occurred in Manchester would never happen again anywhere else. Grace didn’t trust them or anyone. She managed to sleep through the night, although her dreams were filled with nightmares, many of which were memories of the Manchester outbreak. Her alarm woke her at 6am, prompting her to get ready for her first day of work. Before leaving, she dragged the wardrobe away from the door, but didn’t return it to the space where it originally stood — knowing she would only have to drag it back later. She took one last look at the axe in the drawer, then left it behind — but settled for a kitchen knife —placing it in the bottom of her hand bag.

  It was a mostly uneventful first day at work. Although, Grace had to hold her tongue a lot. Many of the calls she took from customers with so-called problems, were about things like their internet cutting out and direct debits coming out of their accounts too early. It all seemed trivial in comparison to the two years of hell she endured. Grace almost lost her temper with one woman, who had been close to tears because it was taking a long time to download some music online. She resisted the temptation to tell the woman that if that was her biggest problem in life, then she had a pretty good life and should be grateful she hadn’t had to live through a zombie invasion.

  ‘How was your first day?’ Grace’s boss asked as she put on her coat to leave at the end of the day.

  ‘Good,’ Grace lied.

  ‘The customer queries weren’t too much for you?’

  Grace shook her head, wondering how her boss and some of the customers would handle what she had been through. ‘Nothing I can’t handle.’

  ‘Good, if you have any queries that are too difficult, then you can always ask,’ he insisted.

  ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll be fine.’

  ‘We have a social evening tonight. Most of the staff usually attend, if you’d like to join us? It might be a good way to meet everyone, get to know them all,’ he suggested.

  ‘I would, but I made plans,’ Grace said. ‘If I had known…’

  ‘Of course, sorry to spring it on you, maybe next time.’

  Grace arrived home to find Luke sitting outside the door to her bedsit.

  ‘One of your neighbours let me into the building. You left town without even saying goodbye.’ His expression conveyed betrayal, as if she was expected Grace to report her every move to him.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘|I threatened a few members of local government if they didn’t tell me where you were,’ he replied, like it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

  ‘I couldn’t stay,’ Grace said, as she unlocked the door and Luke followed her inside. He looked dubiously at the wardrobe near the door, but didn’t comment on it.

  ‘What happened to Mark?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t threaten anyone to tell you that as well?’

  ‘I was concerned about you,’ Luke insisted.

  ‘He left, I guess those who slay zombies together, don’t stay together after all.’

  ‘But he loves you.’

  ‘Obviously not enough. How can you…?’ Grace began trying to change the subject.

  ‘How can I what?’

  ‘Just go back to your old life and act like none of it ever happened?’ Grace asked, despite knowing that going back to her old life would mean becoming homeless again.

  ‘You think that’s what I did?’

  ‘Same town, same hospital, same job. You even had your old house rebuilt,' Grace pointed out.

  ‘When you put it like that...but it’s not the same. I'm not the same.’

  ‘I didn’t know you before, but it sounds like you’re exactly the same.’

  ‘So what should I be doing? Running away and sleeping with a wardrobe against the door?’ Luke questioned as he began opening the chest of drawers, then the drawer under the bed. ‘Or maybe I should sleep with an axe within easy reaching distance.’

  ‘That’s not…I kept that as a souvenir, of good times and all that.’

  ‘Grace, you might be able to fool everyone else, but I know you and I can see straight through your lies, so don’t even try.’

  ‘Was there a reason you came here? Other than to call me a liar?’

  ‘I came here to bring you home,’ Luke said, ignoring the coldness in Grace’s voice.

  ‘I am home,’ Grace retorted.

  ‘What? This place? You spent months sleeping in a doorway, then you’re offered any place you want to live and you choose this place?'

  Grace was silent, not wanting to point out that Luke had omitted the hellish two years in between her homelessness and the offer of anywhere she wanted to live.

  Day 8 of the outbreak

  Grace, Luke and Mark came across three sisters, Lucy, Paula and Yasmin - and her partner, Gregg. The seven of them decided to stay together and try to get out of Manchester. Rumours spread that the army had been called in to prevent people leaving. They heard that food and water supplies were regularly dropped off on the outskirts off Manchester. People were free to take them, but not to leave the city. As the seven of them were running low on food and w
ater, after barricading themselves inside an abandoned clothes shop on the outskirts of the city centre, they decided to take a look for themselves.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ Lucy, the youngest said, not wanting to go back outside and face the dangers out there.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Paula tried to coax her. ‘Just think of it like one of your video games. We’ll get past the zombies and find the food and a way to leave town. The army can’t be guarding every exit.’

  ‘Can we not call them zombies?’ Luke asked. ‘It’s a very contagious medical condition and if I had the time and resources, I could…’

  ‘What? Cure them all?’ Mark asked critically. ‘I hate to break this to you, but those things aren’t people anymore and we’re just food to them. You can try to do medical tests on them or whatever, but I’m going to smash their heads in,’ he announced. He held up a hammer, which he’d found in an old tool kit. ‘Who’s with me?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Grace mumbled feebly to Luke, walking to Mark's side to show her support. ‘I don’t want to die either.’

  ‘Would a cure work?’ Lucy asked.’

  ‘Not if we all want to get out of here alive?’ Gregg chimed in.

  ‘Sorry, Luke,’ Yasmin said, ‘I need to look after my sisters. I wish we could cure those people, but my family is my priority.'

  Lucy, Paula and Gregg nodded in agreement behind her.

  ‘I’m going to be sixteen next week. I'm too young to die.’ Lucy bit her lip to hold back tears.

  ‘If we want to get out of Manchester, we might have to kill uninfected people as well, if they try to stop us,’ Luke pointed out.

  ‘And I’d rather not do that,’ Grace agreed, ‘but if we stay, we’ll die. If they’re stopping us from leaving, they are trying to indirectly kill us, so anything we have to do to them is their own fault.’

  ‘What if we get out and everywhere is like this?’ Luke questioned.

  ‘If everywhere was like this, they wouldn’t be trying to keep us all in Manchester,’ Mark pointed out.

  ‘He’s got a point,’ Gregg backed up Mark.

  They decided to vote on whether to go ahead with the escape plan. Luke was outvoted.

  ‘We leave in half an hour,’ Mark announced.

  Grace used the time to talk to Luke. 'I know it’s not ideal. I don’t want to kill anyone either. Before all this happened I’d never thought about killing anyone or anything, but since that night when you saved me, I’ve lost count of how many infected people I’ve killed. I know you don’t like to call them zombies, but I can’t bring myself to think of them as people because it’s too much, so I can’t think of them as human anymore.’

  ‘I get it,’ he admitted, ‘I just spent so long training to save people, and now I’m killing them. It doesn’t sit well with me either.’

  Grace felt Mark's eyes on her as she squeezed Luke’s hand ‘It’s not much, but you saved me and I think at some point in the past week, you've saved everyone else her, at least once,’ she offered.

  ‘He’s got a crush on you,’ Mark whispered just before they were all about to leave.

  ‘Don’t be silly, he's just a friend,’ Grace replied.

  ‘Not with the way he looks at you,’ Mark insisted.

  ‘Is that anything like the way you keep looking at me?’ Grace asked. ‘Did you think I hadn’t noticed?’

  ‘Just kiss her before we all die, what have you got to lose?’ Gregg asked Mark as soon as Grace was out of ear shot.

  Mark looked like he was considering it, when Luke interrupted. ‘Ready?’ he asked, then opened the door before anyone could respond.

  Their next moments were spent fighting off a few dozen infected. They had been lurking around outside and flocked together as the smell of living people reached their nostrils. Grace used what Mark had taught her, slamming the axe into their heads and pushing through rather than trying to yank it back out. She heard the multiple squelching noises from her own kills as well as those her friends were killing. She managed get a quick look at Luke —as he fought —but his face gave away how much he wished he didn’t have to kill the things that had once been people. She sliced her axe through another head, then Mark was by her side. Neither of them exchanged words, but it seemed like the obvious thing to stand back to back and fight off the stragglers approaching them, as the others fought off the bigger group.

  ‘Everyone okay?’ Mark asked when they were all finished.

  The others answered, telling him that they were still alive.

  ‘Gracie?’ Mark asked, staring at her blood-soaked arm.

  ‘It’s okay, it's not mine, it’s one of theirs.’ She looked towards the pile of now permanently dead infected.

  He didn’t try to reason with her that they weren’t people anymore. They both knew that. Instead, Mark just slipped his arm around Grace as he told the others they should go before more infected came along.

  ‘Get back!’ a soldier was shouting at a group of people, as Mark, Grace and the others hid watching behind some trees just far enough away not to be easily spotted.

  Grace almost threw up as the soldier and his friends opened fire on the civilians, shooting them all dead. Gregg covered Lucy's mouth to prevent her from screaming and alerting the soldiers to their presence. They all stayed in their hiding place, in shocked silence. Yasmin wrapped her arms around Lucy who silently sobbed against her shoulder.

  ‘I’m going to go for a run in that direction to see where the road blocks end,' Gregg eventually whispered.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Luke offered.

  ‘Maybe we should all go,’ Grace stated.

  ‘We’ll find an unguarded exit, then come right back to let you know,’ Luke assured her.

  ‘We should stay here,’ Paula urged, ‘Gregg's a fast runner.’

  ‘I run a lot, I did a marathon,’ Luke offered.

  ‘See? They’ll be quicker without us and then they’ll come back,’ Yasmin announced, before kissing Gregg and telling him not to take too long.

  Grace watched the backs of Luke and Gregg running off into the distance.

  ‘Do you think they’ll come back?’ she couldn’t help asking.

  Nobody had time to answer, as the sound of gunfire began again.

  ‘What the…?’ Mark began.

  Lucy cried out in fear, before Paula and Yasmin held onto her and covered her mouth to muffle her screams.

  ‘They’re killing more people,’ Grace muttered in disbelief.

  ‘I don’t think they want us to leave,’ Mark announced.

  ‘Oh god, oh god, we’re going to die,’ Lucy sobbed.

  Grace forgot her own fear for a moment and tried to coax Lucy instead. ‘It’s okay Luce; we're not going to die. Gregg and Luke will be back soon and they’ll have found a way out. We just need to stay out of sight of those soldiers and we’ll be fine.’

  The five of them moved further back, so that they were better hidden behind more of the trees, as they waited for Luke and Gregg to return.

  Chapter four

  ‘I’m fine Luke, so now you can see that, you can go.’ Grace tried to out-stare Luke.

  ‘No, you’re not fine. None of us are and running away isn’t the way to deal with things.’

  ‘I have a new job, a new home, a whole new life, everything is great.’

  ‘I'm sure we’ve already established that everything is not great, so I think I’ll just stay for a few days.’

  ‘I don’t have a spare bed,’ Grace reasoned.

  ‘The floor’s fine, you know I’ve slept in worse places.’

  Grace couldn’t argue with that, so ended up spending most of the night awake, trying to pretend to be asleep, as Luke lay on the floor. She felt exposed if something got in. She hadn’t pushed the wardrobe against the door, knowing that this would give Luke another opportunity to point out that she wasn’t okay. She also wished that she could sleep on the floor out of view of the door, but didn’t want to have that conversation with Luke either.
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  ‘I know you’re awake,’ he interrupted her thoughts. 'I can hear your awake breathing. It's different to your sleep breathing.’

  ‘That’s not weird at all,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Well, we did sleep in the same room for most of two years.’

  Grace sighed and turned over.

  ‘Are you mad at me?’ Luke asked.

  ‘What?’ Grace sat up. ‘You think I’m mad at you because we spent two years fighting a zombie outbreak together and we're practically like family, then it was all over and I didn’t hear from you. No, why would that make me mad at you?’

  ‘You know where I work and you have my address,’ Luke reasoned.

  ‘I don’t have your address. I only heard from Mark that you lived in your old house, but we didn't know where that was. And I wasn’t going to turn up at your work, when you obviously didn’t want anything to do with either of us.'

  ‘I gave my details to…’ Luke began. ‘They told me they would be passed onto you and Mark,’ he added weakly.

  ‘Well we didn’t get them, we were told the same thing and I thought…’

  Luke stood from his spot on the floor and sat down next to Grace on her bed.

  ‘I feel so stupid now. I should have tried to track you down myself, not trust them after everything they did.’

  ‘I believed them too,’ Grace admitted. ‘I guess we’re both stupid.’

  Luke hugged Grace and she found herself wrapping her arms around him, realising she had missed the man who had become her closest friend.

  ‘Come home Grace, this isn’t the life for you here.’

  She pulled away abruptly. ‘How can you say that? We spent two years trying to leave. It's not home. It's where I watched people get slaughtered. Have you forgotten how we were contained in Manchester? Almost like we were turkeys, trapped inside a giant cage, waiting for Christmas and what about what they did to me?’ She felt the need to remind him.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten any of it and I see it all every time I close my eyes, but I can’t leave now or I’ll be letting it beat me, but you, me and Mark are all that’s left of those two years. I have to pretend every day, but you know the truth about what really happened. I don’t have to lie to you.’