by Frank Tayell
Day 110, Heritage Motors, 30 miles south of Brazely Abbey.
21:00, 30th June.
The rescue plan worked. Sort of. What we needed was a sound louder than an infant, and to hope that whoever was in that restaurant would realise what we were doing and quieten the child whilst we lured the undead away. An ice-cream truck would have been ideal, but where do you find one of those in a world that came to an end in February. What we found worked just as well, at least as far as luring the zombies away from the village.
We left Raysbury Gardens and headed back out the main gate and in a long arcing loop across the empty fields to the north. We deposited the bicycles in the garden of an empty house by a junction on the road we planned to escape on. Then we headed back towards the village, searching for a likely looking property. It took the best part of an hour. We ignored the places that looked like holiday homes, skirted those which looked as though they had been occupied since the evacuation and avoided the all too many which were now occupied by the undead.
In the end we picked a farm on the other side of the main road. The gates were closed and there were two zombies in the yard, but after a few minutes of observation we were both certain there were no more. They appeared battered, as if They had already been in a fight. The one furthest from the gate had an arm hanging at an odd angle suggesting the bone had been broken in at least two places.
With most of the ammunition left with the bikes and uncertain of what we may face later in the day, I motioned for Kim to put the rifle away. Leaving the relative safety of an old barn, I loped across the road and climbed the five-bar gate. Rain, sun and inattention had caused one of the supporting posts to shift and break free of the cement anchoring it to the ground. The gate buckled and collapsed. I jumped forward, and as it fell to the ground with a resounding clatter of gravel, the two zombies stood up and began to move towards me.
As Kim had cut short my attempt near Stonehenge, this was the first opportunity I had to test the new pike. Its more professional construction made it far more manoeuvrable than my home made one. Perhaps because of that, complacency had set in, and I'd neglected to sufficiently sharpen the blade.
The first zombie staggered forward, its clothes mostly tatters except for a long, stained scarf, that kept tangling in the creature's arms as it swiped and grasped at the narrowing gap between us. I swung.
As the pike arced towards the creature, its head jerked towards me at the last second. Its teeth snapped out and bit empty air as, instead of slicing into its neck, the blade bounced off the top of the creature's skull, ripping off a chunk of its scalp.
The force of the blow spun the zombie sideways. It fell to its knees. Without the human reflex to put its hands out in front, it smashed chin first into the gravel driveway, an arc of brownish gore spraying out onto the sun-bleached stones.
I changed my grip and stabbed downwards with the spike. I missed. Some instinctive part of me had assumed the zombie would be stunned, that it would stay prone. But it didn’t. It was already rising to its knees as the point dug into the dirt.
As it stumbled to its feet, its hand batted out at the wooden shaft, knocking the pike sideways. I was gripping it so tightly that I spun with it, and as I was staggering backwards, trying to regain my balance, the zombie was already standing up. The second creature was almost at its side. Kim tugged at my elbow, pulling me back a step, just as that first zombie snapped at me once more.
I levelled the pike and speared it forward just as the creature lunged, its own weight, adding to the force of my blow, drove the point through its skull. It collapsed, taking the pike with it.
The second zombie, the remains of a solitary ski boot on its left foot making its movement slow and awkward, tripped forward. I took another pace backwards, and another, as I tugged at the hatchet in my belt. My eyes still on the creature, I staggered sideways as Kim roughly pushed me out of the way.
She let the axe fall to her side as the zombie got closer. It was five paces away when it's mouth opened and it began to snap. She gripped the axe, two handed, and brought it round in a huge sweeping arc, down onto the creature's skull. It collapsed to its knees, its face split in two, the axe blade buried deep in its neck.
It was brutal, it was efficient, it was, in its way, stunning but above all it was truly terrifying. I had done something similar myself more times than I can count, but watching someone else do it is different. Truly, we have become the barbarians inside the gates.
“They move fast,” Kim said, as she cleaned her axe.
“Not much faster than walking pace,” I replied, retrieving the pike. “Maybe five miles an hour. Perhaps a little more. They haven't the co-ordination to run.”
“Huh,” she grunted.
“That was the first one you've killed. Hand to hand I mean?” I asked clumsily.
“Huh,” she grunted again and headed towards the house.
The doors and windows were still closed and secure. The house was neither infested with the undead nor had it been looted, though rodents and insects had been there long before us. Anything edible and not impervious to small teeth had been devoured, right down to the labels on the tins in the cupboards.
“The glue,” Kim said as she placed the last of three unidentifiable tins into her bag “They eat it. The paper they shred for their nests.”
We found the mp3 players upstairs in a pair of bedrooms that had once belonged to two teenagers. The portable speakers took longer, and we were about to give up and try a different house when I found two sets hidden, perhaps as a sanction during some inter-sibling war, in the back of one of the living room cupboards.
We tested the players by me taking them into a cupboard in what we reckoned was the centre of the house. Whilst Kim barricaded the outside with cushions, ready to hammer loudly the moment she judged the sound too much, I turned them on. They worked.
“If we had time,” I said when I came out, “I'd prefer better equipment.”
“Or a different selection of music?” she asked. “But we don't have time.”
We left the house and parted ways. Kim went back towards the village to get in place to do the actual rescuing of the baby. I headed west, back the way we'd come, to create the diversion.
I needed somewhere close enough that the sound would carry to the village, but somewhere far enough away that They wouldn't be able to hear the baby if it cried whilst they were making their escape.
I found a low slung shed, about a mile from the village, that was once used either by pigs or cattle, or perhaps even turkeys from all I could tell from the scattering of small bones about the floor. I created a ramp out of some old planking and crates and climbed up to the roof.
Decades of rust had eaten away the bolts holding two of the sheets of corrugated steel together. I levered them apart, taped the mp3 player to the side of the speakers and jammed them into the gap. Then I climbed down and headed east towards the town.
It was pleasant being on my own again. Not nice, not good, way short of great, just pleasant. It was the solace of solitude. As I walked through the fields, I had that feeling of being alone in a vast world. I can see how it turned Cannock and Sanders mad, but not me. I felt alone, but not lonely, not the last man on Earth, because whilst it was pleasant to be out there on my own, it wasn't anything more than that. Company, stilted and awkward as it was with Kim, was far better than what I've known these last few months. No, I was relishing the brief pleasure of temporary isolation in the knowledge that companionship was only a short breadth of time away.
About five hundred metres to the north and west of the village is a field in which there is some kind of weather monitoring gear. I think the miniature windmill thing is for calculating wind speed, and the enlarged test tube, possibly measures rain fall, or it might be humidity. I’m not sure.
During most school holidays, except the one I spent at Longshanks Manor, I stayed with Jen Masterton at her family pile up in Northumberland. We had the run of hundreds of acres, getting underfo
ot of dozens of tenant farmers desperately trying to provide for their families.
When, a few decades later, we were looking for a portfolio for her to specialise in, it seemed only natural to pick agriculture. It was when we were trying to put together a press release that we discovered that spending our childhood covered head to foot in dirt, was not the same as understanding anything about the crops grown in it. We stumped for nuclear power instead.
So that array could have been part of some RFID system to track the movement of a herd, or for monitoring the frequency of crop-circles, or counting the number of bees per field or any of a million other things. I’m going to assume it had something to do with the weather.
I stood up, careful to stand with the equipment between the village and myself. I thought I was far enough away that the undead wouldn't be able to see me, but I didn't want to take risks, nor be rushed. I strapped the mp3 player and speakers as high as I could reach, making sure they were secure. Then I hesitated.
This was the first music I was going to listen to since that dreary choral stuff they'd played on the Emergency Broadcast. I scanned the playlists, looking for some tune I recognised. I found nothing. I settled on the list with the most tracks and let the music play. A tinny base beat came from the mp3's players built in speaker. I checked that it was set to shuffle and repeat, plugged in the speakers and turned them on.
As a guitar squealed, and the bass beat sped to a cacophonous crescendo, one by one the heads of the undead turned. I knew They weren't looking at me, not really, but it did seem like it. As the sound, surely the loudest heard since the death of our society, certainly the loudest in our silent world, seemed to bounce off the clouds themselves, the undead started moving towards the hill.
It wasn't an orderly march, as a director might have gotten from a cast of extras. Rather it was the shoving, pushing scrum of the mob. Some at the back, what had been the front of the crowd gathered around the baby and its refuge, now pushed through to the front. By dint of being less desiccated, or with fewer injuries or just by virtue of being younger when They turned, They now had the greater strength. Some zombies were pushed down. Some were trampled underfoot. Others staggered, and were pushed along as the pack shifted and started to flow away from the village.
I was standing, about thirty metres higher than, and two fields and a scraggly hedge away from the road. I watched as the first zombie walked straight into the gate at the bottom of the hill. It was a small creature, possibly a child when it had turned. Its arms waved through the gate, not trying to push it open but trying to walk through it. The gate held. I hadn't considered that. I watched another walk into the hedge and become stuck in the brambles and thorns. I hadn't considered that either.
I panicked. I took two steps down the hill, as another zombie, a much larger one, walked into the gate. This time it moved with a jarring clang I could hear even over the music. Then another, and another and another, then the weight of a dozen bodies was pushing at the gate.
The track finished. I saw the gate start to shift and twist. The next song started and, as a saxophone began a soulful lament, the gate toppled into the field.
I turned and started to walk along the crest of the hill back towards the shed. I didn't hurry, though. I didn't feel any need. I thought I was safe, and I didn't want to tax my leg, not until I had to. Then I spotted another creature coming from the north east, angling across the fields towards the music. That was just one more thing I hadn't considered, of course, that I'd be calling the undead not just from the village, but from every direction around. That was when I began to hurry.
I was half way across the field, still half a mile from the shed by the time the first zombie from the village reached the weather station. It stopped. It wasn't intelligence. I know it looked like it at the time. That's something I keep looking out for, some sign that perhaps They are learning, even evolving, and when that zombie stopped I thought it had. I've thought about it since, and now realise that it had heard the sound, but now it was close enough to use its eyes and it could see no prey. I’m sure that's what it was. Others reached the top of the hill, some stopping closer to the music, some further away. More arrived, and a weird milling about began as They looked, or seemed to look, for the cause of the noise.
I hurried now, running in that skipping lope that my leg brace forces upon me. It took five minutes, maybe more, to reach the shed, long enough for another track to finish and the next one to start. After I'd climbed up onto the roof, I could see at least a hundred gathered around the meteorological gear. It wasn't nearly enough.
I set the speakers to full and turned the music on. I didn't bother to select a playlist, just continued playing from wherever its previous owner had left off. It was an upbeat piece about love in the summertime. Thoroughly depressing under the circumstances and totally unsuited to my darkening mood, but it was loud enough to carry to the weather station. Heads turned. Then about a quarter of Them started heading towards me. This time They moved more slowly, I watched as a zombie stopped and turned back. It walked for a few paces towards the monitoring station, before turning once more and began, with a more purposeful stride, heading to the shed.
I counted to twenty, watching as some of the slower undead only reached half way up the hill before changing direction. Then I climbed down and headed back towards the road.
I don't know how far that music was carrying. Miles at least. The discordant battle between the two playlists would have, in the old world, been drowned out by traffic and tractors, people and planes and all the other symphonies of life. Now, it reverberated off the landscape in a discordant jumble of sound. It was beginning to give me a headache.
Worse, it was calling in the undead from every direction. None that I could see were close. I think all the zombies nearby had drifted into the village over the last few months. The ones heading my way were from much further afield. They were still too far away to see me, or so I hoped, but if I stayed out in the open, one would spot and then pursue me. And where there's one...
I picked up my pace, and made for a tumbledown cottage that had been on the verge of collapse long before the outbreak. I didn't have time to check whether the house was occupied, I just dived into a gap between a woodpile and a broken-down shed. Then I waited.
Sometimes, during the occasional quiet sections of music I heard the shuffling sound of the undead walking along the road mere feet away. Occasionally I would hear rotten cloth tear or dead branches crack as They tried to walk through the impenetrable thickets of brambles and briers bordering the fields. Sometimes, during the brief gaps between songs I thought I heard something else, a knocking sound close by. I sat. I listened. I waited.
It took a bit under two hours, for the batteries at the weather station to run out. Then there was a brief, glorious and wonderful time, when it was just the music from the old shed. Crouched there, hidden, my leg aching from cramp, my whole body tensed to spring up if I heard any sound closer than a few yards, I got to listen to seven songs.
I couldn't tell you their names. I couldn't even tell you if they were objectively any good. To me it was sublime. It was beautiful. It was transcendent. Music's always done strange things to me, and after so long with nothing but my thoughts playing inside my head, the effect seemed amplified tenfold. It was a watershed moment for me. The moment when I started to think that we could do this, we could do more than survive, we could actually live. It was as if these songs were shining a light onto the world that was and the parts of it that one day we could have again. Like I said, music does strange things to me.
And then, as the batteries died, the music stopped. I waited. Without any other sounds, except that of the undead, I could hear the knocking more clearly. It was coming from the cottage. Now it was the loudest sound I could hear.
I was about two miles from where we'd stashed the bikes. The plan was that if I arrived first I'd backtrack into the village to find out what was delaying Kim. If she arrived first she'd w
ait as long as she thought prudent, depending on who it was she'd rescued and, if necessary, we'd meet up at Brazely. We'd mapped out a route, and the assumption was that since it was unlikely that whoever she rescued would happen to have a bike, or that there was likely to be one in the restaurant, they would use mine and I would have to find another one somewhere else. It wasn't much of a plan, but there hadn't been the time and there were too many unknowns to come up with a better one. The question for me then was, had Kim managed to get out of the village?
The knocking got louder. I crawled out from my hiding spot, and looked over at the cottage. The windows were smeared with something a lot worse than dirt, but behind it I could just make out the humanoid outline of at least two undead. That wasn't the worrying part. It was the way that the window was partially boarded up, with tape stuck to each pane of glass. I looked over at the door. It too showed signs of reinforcement. I wasn't getting in, They weren't getting out, so there was nothing I could do to stop the noise. I had to go, somewhere, anywhere, before more zombies came.
The rendezvous was two miles away, but that was two miles in a straight line. I could make out the sound of the undead, still moving through the countryside. A straight line wasn't going to be possible. The Abbey was closer to forty miles away than thirty. On foot, with the undead now roused from their torpor, that suddenly seemed a lot further than it had earlier in the day. I needed speed.
There was nothing but weeds in the cottage's driveway and I couldn't see any sign of a bike amongst the detritus strewn about the garden. Going by the state of the shed and the roof, if I did find one it would be more rust than metal. I had to look elsewhere.
I crawled away to a gap between two pine trees that marked the edge of the property. I vaguely remembered spotting a cluster of newer looking houses near a wider road on the other side of the hill. It was less than a mile. I glanced up and around. I could see movement in the hedges where the undead had become entangled. The idea of trying to head across the fields didn't appeal. If I stuck to the roads, then I would only have to face those zombies that had managed to push through the hedges. Of course those were the tougher, stronger ones, but what other choice was there?