The Dead Walk The Earth (Book 3)

by Luke Duffy

  “Down here,” she called again as she struggled to her feet, her knees shaking and her head spinning. “I’m down here.”

  She stepped across and into the deformed circle of light created by the hole in the roof. Waving her arms and staring up at the ceiling, she grinned. She was about to be rescued after days of suffering and feeling forgotten. Earlier, she had been overwhelmed with despair and contemplating shooting herself, but now it was all over, and she would soon be back on the island, safe and away from the dead city and the hordes of infected that swarmed around her, craving her blood.

  No faces appeared over the lip of the hole, and no voices replied to her calls, but the sounds persisted. Melanie continued to shout and wave her arms, wondering why no one was acknowledging her, and at the very least, reassuring her that they would soon be down to lift her out of there. Staring up at the sky, she waited to see ropes come falling through the ceiling and down into the building. They never arrived.

  “Hey, I’m down here. Come on. Get me out of here.”

  Her calls were ignored. The people that had come to her rescue were clearly too busy with their equipment and did not have time for idle chat. That was how she reassured herself as she remained standing on the rubble beneath the gaping hole. However, her smile was slowly fading from her face. The longer she waited with no reply or sign from the people above her, the more apprehensive she became, unsure of what was happening. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if she had imagined the noises, but then another heavy scrape rang out through the building, returning the feeling of hope to her fevered mind.

  “Here, I’m here,” she continued, screaming at the top of her lungs and jumping about in the light, ignoring the searing pain in her side and the nausea that threatened to overwhelm her. “Answer me. Please, somebody answer me.”

  A distant, echoing voice called out to her, but she was unable to understand the words. More voices joined the first, and Melanie struggled to make sense of what they were saying. Her head was swimming, and the room turned and gathered speed, making her feel as though she was on a carousel. Her knees were shaking and before she could stop herself, a stream of bile erupted from her mouth, spraying out in a wide arc in front of her. She stumbled and fell back, landing in a seated position amongst the dust and debris.

  “I can’t understand you,” she cried out weakly as she wiped the vomit from around her mouth and nose. “Speak clearly. Can you hear me? I’m down here.”

  The voices called out to her again, but they remained a jumble of vowels and completely unintelligible. One thing that she was certain of, however, was that they were growing louder and getting closer. Yet she could still not see anyone above her. The hole in the roof remained devoid of any movement.

  “Help me,” she cried, her voice becoming weaker as her body slumped, having used up every ounce of her energy reserves. Her ears buzzed, and her vision danced. The infection was raging within her, and her senses were taking a beating.

  There was another loud scrape, but this time it came from close by. She looked around in a daze as she swayed with the turning room. The noise was behind her. She turned and saw the door leading into the main room of the restaurant. It was moving. It juddered and slid across the floor, grinding against the clumps of masonry caught beneath it. It moved again, just a few centimetres at first, and then she saw the cluster of fingers reaching through the gap.

  Dozens of rake like hands thrust through and grasped at nothing like the tentacles of some unimagined monster, clutching their bloodless and withered fingers as they continued to push at the heavy doors and the debris and furniture pushed up against it.

  Melanie’s mind returned to her in full, racing back into her head like a howling wind. The mirages and confusion dissipated rapidly from her brain as the mist of the fever evaporated. She gasped with fright and scurried across the floor, attempting to create some space between her and the infected that had managed to force their way inside the building. The outer doors had been breached, and in her weakened state she had failed to notice.

  The doors were suddenly flung open, and a number of dark shadows tumbled into the room, tripping over the rubble and landing in a pile on the floor. More of them surged forward, trampling the prostrate bodies beneath them as they pushed their way through the gaping doorway.

  “Help,” Melanie screamed as she continued to drag her weakened body through the detritus of the smashed building, kicking her feet to force herself along. “Please, help me.”

  The dark faces of the dead turned towards her, their mouths hanging open and their ghostly cries rasping out from their parched throats. They saw her writhing across the ground through the wide beam of light cast down through the hole in the roof. They recognised her animated movements as those of the living; the living flesh that they desired and would stop at nothing to reach. They stumbled forward and began to close in, reaching after her with outstretched arms and longing cries.

  Melanie headed for the cockpit, hoping that the elevated position would afford her a degree of safety. As she dragged herself through the debris, lacerating her palms and tearing her nails from her fingers, the infected followed and steadily gained on her. She attempted to climb to her feet, but her knees buckled, and her body seemed ten times its normal weight. She crashed back down heavily and continued to slither across the floor.

  Above her now was the wreckage of the Gazelle. With tears streaming down her face, she reached out for the skids, hoping to get a firm hold and haul herself inside. Her bloodied fingers curled around nothing but thin air. With a heave and a cry, she threw herself upwards but her hands still did not gain a grip on the helicopter. She crashed back into the dust, the white hot pain in her side wracking her body and causing her to convulse. She did not have the energy or strength for another attempt.

  Rolling onto her back, Melanie saw that the vanguard of the rotting horde were just a few metres away now. They were illuminated by the ring of light from the open sky above them. Their blistered skin and sunken eyes terrified her as their mouths opened and shut repeatedly. She whimpered and turned her eyes to the roof.

  “Please, God,” she prayed, her eyes filled with tears. “Somebody help me. Please, God, I don’t want to die here.”

  The snarls and growls of the infected grew in volume as they advanced on her. Their putrid smell filled her senses, and their inhuman eyes caused her mind to freeze over. At that moment, she realised that there was no one coming to her rescue. The noises and voices she had heard had been from the dead surrounding her. Her mind had played a cruel trick on her, filling her with hope and then snatching it away.

  She raised the pistol and fired, unable to stop her hands from trembling as she loosed off a number of shots into the leading corpses. Two of them tumbled forward, their brains being blown out through the exit wounds in the backs of their skulls. Others took their place and continued the advance. More rounds clapped raucously through the restaurant, but the falling bodies did nothing to stem the flow or drive back the crowd of ravenous ghouls. They wailed loudly, filled with excitement as they staggered towards her.

  “Bastards,” Melanie howled at them.

  As the first corpse, crawling over the body of Mike, reached out towards her, its fingers just centimetres away from her body, she turned the pistol towards herself. She was crying uncontrollably as she stared back at the horrific features of the monster that slithered towards her. Its fingers reached her and closed around her lower leg. She felt it tug at the cloth of her flight suit and heard its lustful groan as it lowered its drooling mouth towards her soft warm flesh.

  “You bastards.”

  Placing the barrel beneath her chin, Melanie pulled down on the trigger. A flash of light shot through her vision and then there was nothing. Melanie’s body slumped, a pool of blood spreading out from the gaping hole in the top of her head.

  The infected swarmed in around her body and began ripping at her clothing and tearing at her flesh. A feeding frenzy erupted, and
within seconds, as limbs were torn from their joints and the sickening cracks of Melanie’s ribcage being pried open echoed over the grunts and groans of the dead, the floor became awash with her still warm and steaming blood.

  The writhing mass of putrid flesh continued their feast, oblivious to anything that was happening around them as they gorged on Melanie’s remains. They did not hear the growing howl above the city or see the fiery object hurtling down from the sky. In the fraction of a second between the missile detonating and the blast wave flattening everything in its path, the blinding light and searing heat of the atomic flash vaporised everything within the city that it touched.

  Above London, the billowing mushroom cloud from the hydrogen bomb grew rapidly, reaching high into the atmosphere above the remains of Britain’s capital.

  24

  It had been almost a week since the mushroom cloud appeared over the horizon towards the south-east. Now Peter stood at the window watching the rain as it beat against the glass, running over the panes in rivulets and cascading down onto the crowd of diseased corpses beneath. He arched his neck to see them more clearly. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all packed together and jostling one another as they fought for a position closer to the house. Their sound carried far and wide, an electrified murmur that never ceased. The noise of the swarm had driven him to despair at the beginning, but now it had become as familiar to him as the twitter of birds or the sound of car engines from the old days.

  He turned his attention to the sky. It had been raining for days now; the rolling dark clouds above were heavy with water and radioactive fallout. The landscape had steadily turned grey in colour as the sunlight failed to penetrate the thick blanket of murky and death laden clouds, and the radiation killed the plant life and trees.

  He was thirsty again. The water that they had collected had run dry that morning, and he knew that he would need to refill the empty jugs and buckets. He could hear the patter of the rainwater as it splashed onto the bare floorboards of the room next door. The hole in the roof had been a welcome alternative to having to hang from a window to collect the water.

  He coughed, his shoulders trembling as another bout of uncontrollable wheezing forced his body into spasms. A trickle of blood dripped from his bottom lip and fell onto his chin. His body shook, and a shiver ran along the length of his spine. He felt weak and frail, and the nausea was not helping his condition. With every mouthful of water that he swallowed, he would spew out twice as much.

  Peter turned and checked on his brother. Michael lay in a foetus position in the centre of the room, wrapped in a dirty and tattered blanket, and shivering uncontrollably. All around him was a great swathe of murky fluid. Some of it was vomit, and the rest was urine and excrement. His breathing sounded strained, and his body twitched endlessly.

  Turning back to the window, Peter looked again at the crowd of diseased faces below. The rain did not seem to bother them as it soaked them through to their rotting flesh, running through their tangled hair or over their thinly covered scalps. They would remain there forever if they needed to, completely unaffected by the elements or the radiation that hung in the air and settled over every surface.

  A coughing fit wracked his body, and Peter soon found himself in convulsions as blood and vomit filled his mouth and throat. Retching, he bent double and emptied the precious fluids over the floor beside him, some of it spattering his boots and trousers. He paid it no attention. He no longer cared about his levels of hygiene. After a few minutes of hacking up every ounce of water that he had remaining in his deteriorating system, he dropped to his knees, his energy completely sapped. He wiped his face with his shaking hands and ran his fingers over his scalp. From his head, large clumps of hair began to tumble past his eyes. He reached up again and felt clumps of his hair easily falling loose from their roots.

  He looked down at his hands and whimpered; his shoulders sagging as his eyes began to fill with tears. His pasty gaunt face and hollow eyes had been a fright to him when he saw his reflection in the filth encrusted bathroom mirror. Now his hair was falling out, and pretty soon he would look no different from the ghouls clambering at the house where he and his brother remained hidden.

  He knew that they were both suffering from radiation poisoning. He had watched the bomb go off in the distance, and when the rains came, understood the danger of nuclear fallout. However, neither of them had taken in any fluid for days. They were slowly dying from dehydration, and faced with the prospect of further suffering while the land outside their windows was drenched with the cool autumn rains, they drank as much as they could.

  Michael had been the first to show signs of the sickness. Within hours he was suffering with uncontrollable and violent bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. Peter suspected radiation but refused to allow himself to believe it. Dying from the effects of radioactive fallout was a thing of the past. It was something that their parents and grandparents had needed to worry about long before either he or his brother had been born. Now, both of them were slowly dying from the poisoning. It seemed impossible to accept.

  “Funny. Guns, war, disease, walking dead people…” Peter whispered hoarsely. “Of all the things that could kill us in this day and age, we end up dying of radiation sickness.”

  Michael squirmed on the floor in front of him, drawing his knees up closer to his abdomen and then proceeding to projective vomit. By now, the blanket was sodden with his own bodily fluids, but Michael did not seem to notice or care. He was in a bad way, and his condition was worsening by the minute.

  “Can you hear me, Mikey?” Peter rasped. The effort of forming the words hurt his throat. It felt raw and swollen, and even breathing was becoming difficult.

  There was no reply. His brother’s breath came in wheezing gasps and sputtering coughs. He seemed incoherent, completely unaware of his surroundings or their predicament as he lay suffering from the terrible symptoms. Peter crawled across to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. Michael twitched beneath his touch and turned his face up towards Peter. He, too, had lost large clumps of his hair. His face appeared like that of a man who was ten times his age and had become little more than a thinly covered skull.

  “Pete,” he groaned through cracked lips, “is that you?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Peter replied. It quickly became evident that his brother had lost his sight as the radiation ravaged his cells. His eyes rolled within the deeply sunken and dark sockets and were unable to focus on anything. “I’m right here.”

  “Where are you? I can’t see you, Pete.”

  Peter began to weep as he watched his brother’s fear laden face. It was obvious to him that not only was he blind, but he had also lost his hearing. He called out repeatedly, demanding that Peter answer him. The poor boy was trapped within his own mind, unaware of what was happening to him, or why.

  Placing his arm around his shoulders, Peter hauled him up onto his lap, holding him close to reassure and comfort him. Michael tucked himself in against his brother like a child against his mother’s breast. There, he drew up his legs and allowed himself to be enveloped in Peter’s embrace. He felt safe, and Peter did not mind or even move when Michael’s bowels once again gave out on him. Rocking back and forth gently while stroking his brother’s head, Peter cried and cursed the Gods for having allowed this to happen to them. As the sound of the rain intensified and was accompanied by the distant clap of thunder, Peter howled at the top of his lungs, spitting profanities towards the heavens.

  Outside, the chorus of the dead shrieked back at him above the rumbling sound of the growing storm. They heard the voice of the living man, sending a surge of excitement through the crowd. The sea of rotting bodies, waterlogged and putrid, seethed and clambered at the walls, clawing at the brickwork and pounding their hands against the creaking doors.

  For hours Peter remained that way, sitting on the floor and nursing his brother, whispering and singing into his deaf ears. His words and soothing tones were occasionall
y interrupted by the uncontrollable coughing that inevitably led to blood and vomit pouring from between his cracked lips. His eyesight was also fading now. The room around him was growing dim, and he was no longer able to see finer details. The tears that remained falling from his eyes added to his poor vision, but he could not stop them.

  It was not for himself that he wept, but for his brother. Michael did not deserve the cruel fate that he was suffering, and Peter felt as though he had failed him. He had vowed to keep Michael safe regardless of what he needed to do in order to keep him that way. He had been willing to kill for his brother if he needed to, but their chances of survival had been taken out of their hands.

  They were both becoming weaker, and he knew that neither of them would last much longer. Michael was suffering a terrible and slow death, and Peter hated himself for not having enough ammunition to take care of them both. He reached down for his pistol, pulling it out from his pocket, and studying it for a while. There was only one round remaining, and he had already decided that it would not be used against himself. It would be the final act of love for his brother, saving him the cursed destiny of becoming one of the things that they had been running from for all that time. He would never allow that to happen to Michael, even if it meant sacrificing himself to that very fate.

  Michael’s wheezing breath continued as he lay in Peter’s arms. It was breaking his brother’s heart to see him in such a way. Despite his mistakes, Michael did not deserve the suffering that he was going through. He had never hurt anyone or anything in his entire life. He had been full of love for everyone that he knew, and happiness and joy was something that radiated out from within his soul, infecting those around him.