Zombie War: Interviews From The Frontline

by Lambdin, Susanne

  “Get out of my damn way! I told you she was going to end up killing us!”

  Two of the men parted, but not by their choice. Mint had pushed them aside and floated from the ground to the height of Bradly. She hovered in front of him for a few seconds and then began to concoct her head one way and then the other in front of his, her eyes turned the orange that they had the first couple of times and then faded into a dark red. She moved her face closer to his and lined her eyes up with his and lifted her hand to his chest. She knew that she had the strength to push him hard and hurt him, but as horrible of a man as he was to everyone, she knew that her anger was getting the best of her. She shoved her hand forward and through his torso and out the other side. She withdrew her hand from his body and dropped to the ground without any strength left. Her eyes flickered and then closed.

  Josaphine ran to her and lifted her head to her lap. She brushed her hair from her face and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Mint’s eyes flickered open and they were back to the normal green. “You need to save your strength, you are going to die if you keep using your powers.”

  Mint nodded and laid on Josaphine’s lap until she had the strength to get up.

  With barely enough strength, the remaining men helped her to stand and again shared their water with her. Mint drank, but could still feel the weakness in her body. They all began to walk slowly down the road to find safety. All thinking of Bradly and what they could have done different for him to not be such a horrid person.

  Josaphine pointed out a building up ahead and all of them agreed to head there to see if it was safe. Once around the corner, rotters covered the street. They tried to backtrack and rotters had surrounded them. This was it, they all knew that they were going to die. They all fought with all of their energy, pushing back the rotters while knowing that Mint was not in a condition to kill them as she had before.

  They gathered together and began hitting the rotters with anything they could find when Mint let out an enormous roar from the other side of the horde. The rotters turned towards her and began wandering in her direction. She floated as she had before with bright orange light coming from her eyes and mouth, she stared at Josaphine and smiled with a nod of thanks for being so nice to her and a nod to all of the men. She leaned her head back and let out another roar and lifted her hands high in the air and brought them down hard to her sides making the ground shake. All of the rotters’ legs came out from under them and they all smashed their heads hard on the ground, cracking them open and making them look like a scrambled egg in a pan. Josaphine and the men all covered their ears, dropped to the ground and ducked for cover. As the noise stopped coming from Mint, the group rose back up to see all of the rotters dead. They, one by one, caught their feet and looked for Mint. Josaphine spotted her in the midst of rotting flesh and ran to her. She was pale and the light had not subsided from her eyes and her mouth laid open. Josaphine reached to feel for a pulse and felt nothing.

  Josaphine looked up to the men that had helped with Mint earlier, with tears in her eyes, she shook her head no at them, “She’s gone, she used too much of her power.”

  Perry stepped forward, “I’m sorry, Josaphine, she killed herself to save us. I myself will always remember that.”

  A moment of silence was had until a zombie rounded the corner and they all had to hurry into the building they were aiming for.

  LEEDS, ENGLAND

  Interviewer: Mick Franklin

  INTERVIEW 23:

  I sit opposite Jake Ironheart in the hotel foyer. Nearby are people with firearms who are very protective of this man.

  I’m not like other hitmen. Most of them aren’t professional. They’re just some mook who is down on his luck and so desperate that he would take literally any job to get out of debt. I’ve seen ordinary guys whose missus has left him and is going for the throat with child payments and the guy literally has nowhere to turn to, so when he’s asked to go kill someone for ten grand he practically jumps at the opportunity. Almost as if he’s the lucky one to be given the chance to go and kill a stranger.

  Quite often these guys get caught. They don’t know how to cover their tracks. I’m not even talking about being conscious of leaving DNA evidence behind or skin particles or whatever other crap they used to show on crime scene investigation television programs. If you are approached by your boss and asked if you will accept money for killing someone and you agree to do the job then you have to maintain appearances after the event. If, prior to killing said person, you and your boss used to go golfing together each weekend then you still need to keep doing that after you killed his wife, or the guy who is bedding his wife. You don’t give anyone a reason to be suspicious. Play it cool and keep up your normal routines.

  If for some reason you do get called up by the police and are questioned down at the station you still play it cool. Remember, there’s no such thing as “off the record.” Everything you say will be used against you. But if you weren’t there you couldn’t have committed the crime, right? If the police tell you they have a star witness that places you at the scene of the murder you deny you were ever there. Even if they have video evidence of you at the crime scene and say, “Look, buddy, that is quite clearly you on the video tape,” your response is, “I admit that guy does look a lot like me, but that isn’t me, because I was never there.”

  As long as you keep on denying your involvement you make it a hundred times harder for them to pin a crime on you. You’re also setting up a solid defence if the case goes to court.

  And while you’re in the hot seat with the police putting pressure on you remember not to react to anything they say. If they insult your mother and call her a whore, fine, she’s the biggest whore in town. Shrug it off. It’s not really personal, so who cares? See, the thing is that when cops are interrogating you they are allowed to say pretty much anything they want to. They can pretend they have witnesses when they don’t. They can insult you to try and get a reaction out of you. Sure, they may have no physical evidence of you being at the scene but if they have a video of you at the police station yelling and flipping chairs during your interview that certainly paints a picture of you being a volatile individual who may well be angry enough to kill somebody. It certainly doesn’t look good to a jury.

  Before you kill somebody try to study their routines. Most hits take place in the morning and they happen within one kilometre of the target’s home. Why? People tend to have set routines, especially in the morning. They tend to get up and go to work at the same time each day. People are much less predictable in the evening –they could be doing anything, working late, going for after work drinks, whatever.

  When I decide how I’m going to kill the target I give some consideration to destruction of evidence. I used to keep a collection of guns I had either stolen or bought illegally years before so that even if the cops did find the gun they would have a hard time tracking it back to me. When I disposed of the gun I would completely dismantle it and go for a drive, throwing it away one piece at a time in different rivers that I passed. As for fingerprints and all that WD40 destroys DNA evidence.

  A lot of people chicken out at the last minute. Right before they pull that trigger or right before they leap out that doorway and start stabbing. They give the target a chance to defend themselves, or perhaps worse, identify you later on. Me, I never had that trouble. I often smiled while I was killing somebody. And I mixed it up. Sometimes just because I didn’t want to leave a pattern for the police, sometimes because the client had paid for something special like some girl who didn’t just want her husband’s insurance money but also wanted to know the end was painful for him, but mostly because I just like to try new things.

  I’ve drowned people while they were taking a bath by grabbing their ankles and pulling them under. They couldn’t fight their way to the surface again. I’ve shot and stabbed people. I killed one warehouse manager by shoving him butt first into a barrel, so that his head and feet were sticking out the t
op. That one’s called “barrel of laughs,” because it looks hilarious, but the target isn’t laughing because it’s almost impossible to get yourself out of that situation, so you end up dying of exhaustion from struggling. One time I had to kill a CEO, but the security of the building were pretty good. I tell you, the best way to infiltrate the most secure building in the world is to be a man with a mop. I turned up in coveralls with a bucket and they let me right in. I was washing a window when the target walked by me. I picked up the bucket and threw it over him – it was full of petrol. Then I set him alight and got out of there.

  What were you doing when the War started?

  Killing my father. I put two bullets through his heart because he tried to tell me what to do. Idiot. He should have known me well enough not to get in my way. See, I was over at my parents’ house with Kevin “Hacksaw” Richards, the gangster, he had actually helped me make a few bodies disappear in the past. We were having a drink together, just about to start work on a new contract and I needed his help again in making the body vanish. My mother walked in with a tray of snacks for us and Kevin wouldn’t stop looking at her. I asked him what was wrong and he said he wanted to sleep with her.

  I asked him to repeat himself so he looked me dead in the eye and told me he wanted to sleep with my mother. Can you believe the nerve of the guy?

  So I called my mother back in and told her to have sex with Kevin. She became all quiet and refused so I started slapping her around. That’s when my father came in, trying to be the man, trying to tell me I had gone too far this time and he wanted me out his house. Maybe it was a little extreme, but when he put a hand on me I drew my gun and shot him in the heart.

  Mum was crying and fussing over his body. I told her to get out and fetch me a beer. When she was out of the room my dad got back up again. I couldn’t believe it. I shot him in the heart again, turning to Kevin and saying, “Can you believe this guy?”

  My dad wouldn’t stay down. Kevin was watching him, all amused like, as he got closer, not expecting much from an old guy, but then my dad bit Kevin’s face off, Kevin’s nose waving and flapping from his teeth as he shook his head around like one of those dogs with the big heads that tears into things. Kevin was screaming and pissing his pants. I just laughed and sat back down to watch.

  Kevin’s feet were kicking madly as my father ate him. Some tough guy, he couldn’t even fight off an old man. My mother came back in and saw what had happened and she just ran. To this day I don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she’s happy somewhere, who knows? As I turned around to face my father again I felt something I had never felt before –fear. It wasn’t like when I wondered if I would get away with a hit or not, or when a police car pulled me over, this was like looking at death himself, someone who could not be reasoned with, could not be bought. You know, sometimes before I killed someone I would need to question them, and they were all too ready to give me information. It’s amazing what a person will do for a few seconds more of life. This was completely different. This man was purely focused on killing me.

  I was scared, really. All my instincts were firing up inside me, screaming inside my skull for me to leave. Now, normally I pick my battles, I don’t go face to face with someone if I can just bide my time and stab him in the back later. However, this time I wasn’t thinking clearly. I wanted to dispel this fear that was gripping me. It felt like I was staring into an abyss that was sucking me in, and I knew if I gave in to it that it would never set me free.

  So I charged forward, determined to beat some sense into dad. I began slapping his face, scolding him. He looked surprised for a second, a bit like a lion might look if its prey decided to run towards it instead of away from it and straight onto the dinner plate, but then he grabbed my arm. His grip was like a vice, I was shocked at how strong he had become. Before I could stop him he had bitten a chunk out of my arm. The pain was incredible. I looked at him with shocked eyes. He took another, bigger bite.

  I managed to shake free, largely because he was focused on eating the pound of flesh he had taken off me.

  I ran then, out into the snow, clutching my bleeding arm. The pain made me delirious. I made it to a hospital, seeing hundreds of other people like me, sitting there and clutching bite wounds on their bodies. I could see these people in various stages of the illness, the sickness seeping through their faces, eyes haggard, a kind of yellow and purple oozing up through their skin. I’ve long been a student of human behaviour and looking around I understood that the bites caused the infection, or if you like the bites caused a person to die and anyone who died became one of those damned ghouls.

  I made my way through the hospital to the storage rooms. People saw me but no one stopped me. I had to infiltrate a hospital in the past to kill a guy who I had only wounded, so I had just worn a suit and put a stethoscope around my neck. I blended right in. This time, the place was pure chaos. It was the night that Leeds fell. No one was too concerned about one wounded man poking around.

  In a store room I found a tourniquet and a bone saw. Everything I needed. I closed the door and locked it. I knew my arm was going to cause me to become a zombie, like my stupid father. My instincts had never let me down, I only got hurt because I had refused to listen to them.

  I took the saw and began paring flesh off my arm. It was amazing how quickly the disease had took hold, the meat in my arm was already turning purple and black. I had to keep cutting deeper.

  Afterwards I stood staring at my diseased arm. There was a lot of flesh and blood I had left behind. Would it be enough? Would the zombie virus take me anyway? I flexed my hand and I couldn’t close it properly. I don’t know why, if I maybe struck a nerve or something. Later on, I trained my hand to be strong in a “C” position so I could crush throats. At the time I thought about all the magic that arm had created, all the people it had helped me kill. I remember thinking I would probably never strangle a woman to death again. Life can be very cruel sometimes.

  I left the hospital just as some of the other bite victims began thrashing around and reanimating as zombies. At that time the hospital staff didn’t know what the hell was happening. No one did. But I suspected. I left them to it as I walked out into the cold night air, feeling sorry for myself.

  Do you think perhaps you are immune to the virus? I mean, I have heard of people surviving a zombie bite if they amputate an entire limb, I have never heard of someone surviving by simply cutting away some flesh.

  Yeah, maybe I am immune.

  Did you ever consider letting someone know, like some scientists or doctors?

  Not a fucking chance! If you weren’t born with my superior genes then that’s just too bad.

  How did you see out the War?

  In style! There was a shelter set up in the Hilton in Leeds. I stayed there, just another nameless victim. I quickly saw the potential of the place, I got lorries to block off the surrounding roads so that if anyone wanted to attack they would have to do so on foot. That also limited the amount of dead that could gather outside at once. I led a raid on a hunting store so that all my survivors had weapons, anything from shotguns and hunting rifles to crossbows and airguns. I also taught them how to shoot. There were about two hundred people in that hotel under my care.

  How did you become the leader of that group?

  The previous leader disagreed with me. He had a little accident, shall we say. Took a dive right off the top of the building and landed head first on the concrete. He didn’t revive but when we got to him a dozen ghouls were feasting on his remains. I had to hide a smirk as his daughter Jenny screamed and cried in the street. Concerned survivors pulled her away and we did our best to clean up the old guy’s carcass, although I didn’t see the point. People just get too sentimental over things. I’ve never had that problem.

  For five years I led those survivors. That girl, Jenny, became my bitch. I tell you what every time I was nailing her in the penthouse suite I kept on smiling because I wanted to tell her that it was me who
had killed her father. It wasn’t suicide.

  Anyway, there were a few serious events we faced. There was an army of the undead, literally millions of them, that poured out of London near the beginning and swept up the country. People who lived through that will never forget it. If you didn’t have a sturdy place to hide or you couldn’t run away you were fucked. We watched a group of thirty or so survivors in another building four blocks away try to take on that army. They used Molotov cocktails and petrol bombs to set the ghouls on fire. My people were pestering me to join in, to use our firearms against the ghouls. I told them no way, just keep quiet and we would survive this. There was a lot of muttered disagreement but pretty soon they saw why we were staying out of it.

  The other group of survivors had burned a lot of ghouls, sure, maybe five hundred or so. But don’t forget there were millions of them. They now knew where the food was, it was holed up in a building. The zombies relentlessly attacked that building, the weight and pressure of millions of squirming bodies pressing against that concrete until finally, days later, it gave way. We heard the screams from where we were. I don’t think anyone from that group made it. Or certainly not anybody that I saw made it out.

  There were other hordes like that, but never as big as the one that came from London. I didn’t like confronting these larger groups, not because I was afraid but because I understood they were as much a danger for anyone who tried to attack us as they were to my own group. In other words, they provided an excellent guard dog service.

  There was another fairly large horde that just didn’t seem to want to go away. I don’t know if they were a different breed of zombie or if some of my people accidentally made some noise and gave away our location, but these damned ghouls weren’t going anywhere. Something had to be done. We were running low on supplies. The train station was very close by so we created a distraction and ran to the train yard, me and three guys who were competent. We set up a train with some music playing on the loudspeakers, “Stuck On You,” I think it was. The train moved off slowly down south, we rigged it so it would stay slow and wouldn’t get too far away from the horde. It did the job, a huge version of the Pied Piper taking the army of zombies away from us. Of course, I have no idea where all those zombies ended up.