by Frank Tayell
I collapsed into one of the chairs, throwing up a cloud of dust, and just sat for a while. I don't know for how long. Perhaps an hour, perhaps more.
When I came back to myself, I remembered the keys. The keys Kim had used to remove the cuffs. The same keyring would surely have the door key on it. I was certain that it was still in the room, discarded next to the handcuffs. Wearily, I unstacked the pile of furniture and opened the door.
The moment I entered, the noise from undead increased. The hissing groan of air, the snapping of teeth, the ripping of flesh and cloth on the jagged fragments of broken glass in the window frame, it seemed to fill the silent house.
Reaching through the window a forest of arms grabbed at empty air as I frantically scanned the floor. I tried to keep the torch pointing downwards, but a shadowy sea of hands kept playing against the walls as undead arms grasped through the broken window. They shoved, They tore, They pushed, and the noise grew until... you remember that expression, “loud enough to wake the dead”? Never was that more appropriate than when, with a splintering crack, the window frame broke.
I saw the keys, grabbed them, and ran from the room. I pulled the door closed, locked it and slumped with relief back onto the chair. Thirty minutes passed. This time I kept count. The noise didn't subside, but nor did it get any closer. I told myself They weren't getting in. I tried to believe it.
I stood up and walked a short way along the dark corridor towards where I thought the main doors were. I slowed, then I stopped. I physically couldn't go any further. I tried to force myself to take another step. I told myself it was stupid, foolish, childish even. That I was compelled by nothing more than a metaphorical desire to pull the blankets up to hide from the monster under the bed. Still I couldn't take another step. I turned, went back down the corridor and piled the furniture back up outside the door.
I know it won't do any good, or the rational part of me knows that, but that's a very small part these days. Afterwards, looking at my barricade of once-priceless antiques, I felt better, and perhaps that is all that matters.
The main doors were more than secure, they were nailed shut. It would take at least a day's work to open them again. I found the old kitchen door, the one Sanders and Cannock must have used to get in and out of the house. The door was bolted, with a fridge dragged in front of it, but from the scuff marks on the floor I could tell that it had been frequently moved back and forth.
When you revisit places you knew as a child, they're meant to seem smaller. Not so with the Manor. It the dim light of the torch it seemed to have grown. No matter which way I turned, which passageway I took, I never seemed to end up where I wanted. I tried to be systematic, tried to check each room in turn but really didn't do anything more than wander the halls with a disconsolate lethargy.
Tiring, and genuinely worried I might get lost and end up wandering the building all night, I retreated back upstairs. I moved a few benches to block off the top of the staircase, and moved some cabinets into the corridor on either side of the bedroom door. On top of this flimsy barricade I placed a pair of antique vases. My hope was that if the undead did get into the house, and upstairs, then I would be woken by the sound of breaking china. Only then did I go back into the bedroom.
Kim was still unconscious. Passed out or sleeping, I couldn't tell which. I stood watching her just long enough to reassure myself that she was still breathing. Then I closed the door and pulled a chest of drawers in front of it. I looked over at her again. The noise hadn't woken her.
I have found another survivor. More than that, I found three and whatever fantasies I had about this moment, they couldn't have been further away from the reality.
In the end, I didn't kill a man. I tried to, and I think that amounts to the same thing. I feel as though I should be examining my conscience, asking myself “how I feel”. I don't feel anything, at least not about his death. I didn't know him, and from all I can infer, my world is a safer place without him in it. That isn't an answer, though, it's just finding an explanation for my lack of emotional response. Sanders and Cannock tried to kill me and now they are dead. That really is all that needs to be said.
It's this waking nightmare we are in, where none of the old rules apply. I feel I can't be certain about anything, that I can no longer even trust the evidence of my own eyes. It's not paranoia. It's just part of this never ending cycle of horror for which there will never be any therapy, never any happy endings, nor any time when we will be able to look back on this and know that it is over. With those and a million other dispiriting thoughts running through my head I collapsed into a chair.
I must have fallen asleep, because when I next opened my eyes dawn was just beginning to creep over the tree-line. It was the sound of the rifle being reloaded that had woken me. A few feet away, the gun propped up on the table by the window, patiently taking aim at the undead below, was Kim.
“Morning,” I muttered, standing up. The duvet I'd thrown over her, that she in turn must have placed over me when she woke, fell off and onto the floor. I looked around. Sander's body was gone. She must have already moved it. So much for me waking up if the undead got into the house.
Kim had found some new clothes, or, rather some old, not-recently worn ones. A set of hard-wearing gear, more suited to a rain drenched autumn than the start of a hot summer.
I walked over to the window.
“How's your wrist?” she asked.
“What? Oh,” I flexed it. It was sore, but I really had had a lot worse. “Fine. Thanks,” I added, and feeling that was insufficient I went on. “How's... ah...” I stalled and decided to change tack “How many. Out there, I mean?”
“About a hundred,” she said. “Give or take.” Then she pulled the trigger.
“Are you familiar with guns?” I asked.
“Not really,” she replied as she reloaded the gun with casual ease. I looked down at the grounds. I could only count about four dozen or so moving zombies.
“I can only count...” I began.
“The rest are around the side of the house,” she said.
“By the window to the... your...” I stalled again, unsure how to finish the sentence.
“About thirty. Another ten or fifteen stuck in the maze, a few others scattered around the back. I checked first thing.” She fired again. Now that I was looking in the right direction I saw her target collapse. Then I saw it try and move, its arms waving, its legs twitching.
“Chest,” she said. “It's the suppressor, I think.” She reloaded, shifted her aim and fired again. The bullet entered the zombie's head as it was trying to stand. “Less accurate, but less noise. Noise is definitely more important.”
“I've never fired a gun before,” I said, half to myself. “Well, I did fire a shotgun, once. At some clay pigeons. I fell over. The recoil.”
“Right,” she said, and fired again. I looked over to the table next to the rifle. One box of ammunition was opened, and already half empty. On the floor other boxes were scattered about, all empty. Around her feet the carpet was littered with spent cartridges. Counting the shots fired at me yesterday, hundreds of rounds had been wasted on little more than target practice.
“It would be better to conserve ammunition,” I suggested.
“Sure. Better. But you just said you don't know how to shoot, and I’m out of practice.” She turned to look at me, and for the first time since we'd met, I saw her eyes properly. They were cold, hard, unforgiving, hidden beneath a haunted depth of recent experiences I can only hope I never understand. “And,” she went on, “can you think of a better time to practice than this?”
Knowing that whatever she was doing, it wasn't target practice, I left her to it and went off to find some clean clothes for myself.
The more I loot, the better I'm getting at reading the signs left by the previous inhabitants. Washing still in the machine or dirty crockery in the dishwasher is a sure fire indicator the occupants fled the night of the outbreak. A house that's immacul
ately tidy, with the beds made, the washing up done, everything unplugged and the valuables inexpertly hidden under a floor board, belonged to someone who went on the evacuation. A note on a kitchen counter or stuck to the fridge shows someone who left sometime in between. A note pinned or nailed to the front door shows someone who left soon after.
Then there are the places like this, which have been occupied since the collapse. The fireplaces, whether they worked or were just purely decorative, are full of ash and half burnt furniture. Usually, though not here, it'll be just the one fireplace, with chairs and stools pulled up close to it, giving a rough estimate of the number of survivors at that refuge's peak. The chairs aren't gathered there for heat, not entirely anyway, but primarily for light to read by, during the long sleepless nights.
The books, lying discarded at the feet of the chairs, provide an interesting insight into the specific crisis that the group faced and feared most. Encyclopedias, histories and historical fiction, biographies, maps, travelogues, cook books, DIY and how to guides, anything and everything that might provide even the most tenuous of clues as to surviving another fear-filled day. The books closest to the chairs are the ones that seemed most helpful, or perhaps the most reassuring. Those whose charred remains lie in the grate, they are the ones found wanting. It is amongst those ashes that, if they had any in the house, you will find the zombie books. I did the same in the end, burning them out of desperate frustration when it became clear how far from this stark reality even the best fiction is.
Usually, in the room with the fire, there will be a table. On it will be every item that could possibly be conceived of as a weapon, but which was rejected when the survivors left. Cricket bats, hockey sticks, hammers, axes, knives, ornamental sabres, shovels, spades, the improbable and the implausible, all heaped next to open packets of nails and rolls of wire. The only thing missing will be the poker, usually left by the fire, next to a sharpening stone where someone has tried to add an edge to wrought iron.
These are the homes of the people who thought they could stay put and ride out the storm. They are the people who thought everything would work out. They waited for help that they were sure must come. At first they expected our government, then it was any government, that somehow, someone, somewhere in the world would come to save them. Then they were forced by hungry desperation to leave.
The Manor is like that, but on a bigger scale. It's hard to say exactly who was here after the outbreak, or, with the exception of two of them, who they were. When the evacuation day came, some left, some stayed on, perhaps for a week or two. Probably, judging by the bones in one of the kitchen bins, until the easily caught wildlife had been eaten.
The cupboards here are empty, but that's normal too. Long before the food ran out, packets of anything and everything with any calorific value, from herbs to toothpaste, would have been gathered together. There's always a notebook next to the treacherously inaccurate kitchen scales, where the survivors have laboriously poured over the nutritional contents of every morsel in the house. A menu of the inedible, for this time of the unthinkable, devised sometimes with loving inequality, sometimes with distrusting fairness.
Usually I find these grimly fascinating, here though, I recognised some of the names. Arch and Bell, Archibald Greene and Annabella Devine, the butler and housekeeper. When I knew them as a child, Mr Greene was always apparently furious with “these young 'uns, messing up my house”. Mrs Devine would always be ready with a kind word for a torn shirt or bruised eye after my almost weekly fights with Sebastian over my being orphaned and him being about to inherit one of the largest estates in the UK.
Then, they can't have been more than forty, though that seems ancient enough to a child. They'd celebrated a wedding anniversary that summer. I don't recall if it was ten years or fifteen or twenty or, perhaps, just one. The Duchess threw them a glorious party, for one night treating them and their guests as if they were royalty. Jen, Sebastian and I were decked out as footmen whilst the Duke even attempted to wait at table. It was my happiest of memories, now made eternally sad by seeing their names written down on that scrap of paper. I wished, then, that I'd never come to this house.
There is one aspect of the Manor that is very different from anywhere else I have been, the weapons. The gun cabinets were empty. Not that there ever many here. The Duke had been invalided out of the service, returning home as a pacifist. He kept a few ornate shotguns, more antiques than fire-arms, but they had gone. The others, the older memento's of ages gone and wars long forgotten, they adorn almost every room. If one wants a weapon, all one has to do is take it from the walls. I’m trying to remember what used to hang in the gaps. Morning-stars, maces, long-swords and lances, all already gone. There are plenty of weapons left, though.
I found six pikes hanging from the wall of one long overtly splendid room that was just as I remembered it. The twenty foot long, five inch thick, teak table, the ten foot tall portrait of the eighth Duke hanging over the fireplace, the Persian rug with its pile so deep you could lose a whole canteen of cutlery in it, and the candelabra to illuminate a room that had no electric lighting. It had been designed to awe and intimidate, a place to dine when unwanted guests arrived and needed to be dissuaded from staying the night. That was why, I had been told, every inch of wall space was taken up with ancient steel.
I don't think the pike I chose is a genuine antique. It looks and feels slightly different to the others. The blade is less pitted and discoloured, the handle doesn't have that worn-smooth-by-use feel and it feels lighter yet somehow more solid. Perhaps it is a genuine replica, an old replica certainly, but something made a few decades ago to replace an even older piece that rotted beyond service even as a decoration.
I found the sharpening stone exactly where I expected to. It was on the hearth next to the fireplace. A plain oak chair I once remembered as having sat by the window in the Butler's study, stood pulled close to the only spot in the house with warmth and illumination once the power went out.
Pike in hand, I returned upstairs. Kim was still in the same position, still firing.
“You should let your shoulder rest,” I said. She looked up. “The recoil,” I added.
She fired off one more round. I watched as one of the undead outside collapsed. It didn't get up.
“Head shot,” she said, laying the rifle to one side, standing up and stretching. “Four in ten. My hit rate.”
“Have you done much shooting, then?” I asked again. There was so much to ask, so many questions, but where is one meant to start? All those old conversational gambits about family and hobbies and jobs and schools, it all seems supremely irrelevant now.
“University,” she replied, almost with an effort, as if she was reluctant to share anything personal, even something so pertinent to our immediate survival.
“What? A shooting club?” I asked.
“No. Year abroad. Oregon,” she shrugged. “Host family were gun-toting, red-neck, Republican stereotypes. Nice people. Really nice people,” she added with emphasis. “Shooting range on Saturday, church on Sunday and hunting as soon as the season started.” Her expression softened. “And there was me, a hippy liberal.” She paused. “It was fantastic. I got very good at bowling, expert at charring meat on a grill and moderately OK at shooting. Not good, not bad, but OK. It comes back to you. Like falling off a bike.”
“Um,” I stumbled trying to think of a response. The short utterance was enough to draw the veil back over her eyes. Desperate to say something, anything, I asked, “Do you want a cup of tea?”
She laughed. I didn't think it was that funny. Perhaps she was so highly strung, she was looking for, needed, any kind of release. The shooting was a manifestation of that, I think. The laugh was another, and I guess I also needed a release, because I started laughing too.
We found a bedroom that, going by the thick smell of mothballs and even thicker layer of dust, had lain empty since long before the outbreak. I opened the flu, letting out a shower
of dirt and soot onto the ornate rug, doused the coal stacked decoratively in the grate with lighter fluid, and lit it. Despite the warmth of the day, we each pulled a chair close to the fire and sat.
“Cold toast,” I muttered after a while.
“What?” Kim asked.
“Cold toast. I was looking around the room and thinking. Imagining what it would have been like a century ago. Picturing the Dowager Countess lying in bed, spreading warm butter on cold toast whilst listening to a maids 'downstairs' gossip.”
“Oh,” she replied. “Why's the toast cold?”
“Toasted in the kitchen. By the time it gets up to the bedroom it's always cold. It's one of the things they used to say about the Lords and Ladies of those times. They didn’t know toast came out hot.”
“Huh.” She poked the fire.
“The Duke, he told me that. Said it was why he had a toaster on the sideboard in the dining room. The Duchess hated it of course, said it wasn't in keeping with an ambience of stately nobility. That didn't stop her using it of course.”
“The Duke of this place? You knew him?” she asked with genuine curiosity.
“Sort of. I spent a summer here with someone. Her family knew the Duke's family. I tagged along. It's... complicated.”
“Right,” she said.
Wanting to steer the conversation away from the past and the inevitable question of who that girl grew up to be, I changed the subject. “No water. I mean there's the water they were bringing up from the Lake, but I didn't know how safe it would be to drink, even after boiling.”
“So you're making tea with lemonade?” she asked as I cracked open a tin and poured it into a small saucepan I'd brought up from the kitchen.
“Yup. It works well. Think of it as tea with sugar and lemon,” I added, pouring in a second can. The saucepan went onto the fire, and I sat back.