by Woods, Mark
Apparently, according to what little the scientists could ascertain, the virus sent its victims into a kind of rabid, animalistic frenzy – thus explaining the sudden outbreaks of violence that had occurred in the wake of the Terrorist attacks - but the good news was that the effects of this frenzy were so extreme that in most cases, the human body, unable to cope with this sudden burst of aggression and the flood of endorphins it was being subjected to would, in the majority of instances, end up quickly burning itself out, essentially resulting in death.
Unfortunately the bad news was that this didn’t stop the virus. For even after an infected victim’s body was dead, somehow it seemed the virus was still able to keep the host animated, and would then resurrect the victim’s body with the sole intention of using it to further spread the disease, ostensibly through biting anyone not already infected.
And with anyone and everyone who was bitten very quickly turning into a disease ridden Zombie, in this way, so the virus was able to continue to spread as long as there were people still left alive.
All of those of us who were left, here in the Tower Block - only around fifty or so, I suppose, after those who had decided to leave - were no longer able to deny what was happening. It was no use trying to pretend anymore that Zombies were just the delusions of a select and crazy few on the internet – no, not when all you had to do was look out of your apartment window or gaze down from the roof and out across the city to see the Dead staring right back up at you; moaning constantly, alerting others of their kind that there was food here, even if they couldn’t quite manage to reach it.
For those of us who thought that such a thing could never happen, the truth of this new reality hit us pretty hard....and it was in those first few days and weeks that nine of the people living with us became the first to end their lives.
Knowing that the power would not last indefinitely and anticipating that there would come a time when we would have to rely on just our canned goods for any sustenance, all of us until now had instead stuck to simply eating the perishable, refrigerated or frozen items that were the most likely to spoil. Every meal was rationed, and not least because none of us fancied leaving the safety of our tower block any time soon to try and go out and find supplies. We set up water butts and buckets and such like to catch rain water for bathing in, and used the water from both our baths and our toilets for drinking water - the cisterns, not the bowls I should add – to try and stop us becoming dehydrated. Any bottled water that we had, we tried to keep back for later and though I have no doubt that a few of us may have kept back secret stashes of food they didn’t want to share, for the most part, the rest of us were all sensible and divided our food equally.
I don’t think there was any one of us who didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation we now found ourselves in, and though I’m not suggesting for one moment that we all always got on - and it’s true that there were plenty of squabbles and arguments in those first few weeks as all of us got tired, frustrated and more and more hungry - still all of us that had decided to remain here knew full well that if we ever wanted to survive, we all needed to stay united and work together.
Within a couple of days of the power going out, we quickly exhausted all of the refrigerated and frozen items we had left. We had to if we didn’t want any of it to spoil.
Thinking back, that is the last time I ever remember truly feeling full. Nowadays, all I ever seem to feel is constantly hungry and two years in, with our food stocks now lower than they have ever been in all the time we have been up here, we really have had to start keeping a much tighter rein on what little we have left.
I’ll say one thing about the Zombie Apocalypse – with all the weight we’ve all lost since this started, it’s certainly got to be one of the best diet plans around!
I don’t think I’d really recommend it though.
Chapter eleven: Sisters of the Z-pocalypse
Samantha Devlin (Sammi D) and Kirsten Louise Huey (K) had been best friends for as long as either of them could remember.
They did everything together.
They lived together, they worked together, and on nights when they dressed up and went out on the town, you could almost always guarantee to find them together. They had even been known to share boyfriends on the odd occasion, much to the delight of all parties involved.
Not that they were sluts, you understand, they just liked to party.
They liked to enjoy life.
They believed very strongly in living each day in the moment, in seizing life very firmly by the balls, and taking each day as it came.
The two of them were so close they were practically sisters…and everything they did, they always did it together.
With any other friendship, you might have expected the U.K ‘lockdown’, when it arrived, to have taken its toll, and to have tested their very close relationship.
Not so with Sammi and Kirsten.
If anything, it had only strengthened their bond and brought the two girls even closer together, if that were at all possible.
Unable to go out for nights on the town, they had instead brought the party to their apartment instead – connecting with the other girls they normally hung out with remotely, via Skype or FaceTime, for a whole series of girly nights in.
Having stocked up on booze, enough to sink a battleship, the girls had all spent most of their time in lockdown either drinking themselves into oblivion, or recovering from the night before.
So on the day that Z-day arrived, Sammi and Kirsten barely even noticed or paid it much attention.
At least not at first…
***
The first Sammi or Kirsten realised anything was wrong, was when they tried to video call their friend, Kelly, after a particularly heavy session the night before.
Kelly had spent the last ten days in self-isolation, unable to go out or even leave her house after her boyfriend had been diagnosed positive of contracting the virus H1N1-Z.
His symptoms were not too severe – Gavin, himself, had described them as being no worse than a particularly bad case of Man-flu – but because they shared the same house, obviously Kelly had been forced to cut herself from all other contact and self-isolate alongside him.
Kelly, Sammi, Kirsten and a few of the other girls had all spent the previous night drinking copious amounts of alcohol and indulging in a bit of video Karaoke. Sammi and K had been trying to raise Kelly’s spirits because she had been starting to get a bit down about the whole ‘quarantine’ business and they’d felt like she probably needed cheering up.
Certainly she’d hit the bottle a bit hard the night before, which was why Sammi and Kirsten were phoning her to make sure that she was alright, and not feeling too rough, especially seeing as how Kelly had confessed earlier that week that chatting to both girls was the only thing helping to keep her sane right now.
Two days ago, Gavin had started going downhill and had begun struggling to breathe, but no doctor or paramedic would come out to him unless his condition worsened and became life threatening because the country was desperately short of respirators and ventilators, and simply did not have enough to go round.
It was not the fault of the NHS.
The NHS had been stretched to it’s full capacity.
At many hospitals, many of the staff didn’t even have enough PPE – or personal protection equipment - let alone enough ventilators or respirators to give to everyone who was ill. Already struggling, even before the recent pandemic, the NHS was now close to breaking point, not least because of all the government budget cuts of the past couple of years, and quite simply was unable to cope.
That morning, or late afternoon really by the time either girl had emerged from their pit, Kelly had taken a long time to answer.
Figuring she was still probably hungover - like them, Kelly knew how to party and had certainly needed to let off a bit of steam last night after looking after her boyfriend, Gavin, all day – at first the girls weren’t too
worried.
It wasn’t until about the third time Sammi tried to call her, that the two girls started to fret.
Suddenly the video call connected.
Kelly answered the phone, blood pouring down her face.
“Holy…what happened to you?” Sammi asked her as soon as the call went through, but Kelly interrupted before her friend could say anymore.
“Oh thank God, thank God that it’s you,” Kelly said. “Please God, I need you to call the police,” she told her two friends as they looked on in shock.
“I’ve been trying, but I can’t seem to get through. It’s Gavin. He’s gone off his nut, gone crazy…oh God, oh God, he’s coming…”
Kelly broke off, and dropped the phone presumably on the hall table.
On the screen, Sammi and Kirsten could both see Kelly’s boyfriend, Gavin, rushing down the hall towards her.
“Gavin, please. You need to go back and lay down,” Kelly was saying. “The doctor’s coming, I called him. You just need to calm yourself down until he arrives…”
She turned back towards the phone and picked it back up again.
“Please, Sammi,” Kelly was saying. “Can you call the police, paramedics, someone? Anyone. I’m scared, Sammi. I’m really scared. I don’t know why I can’t reach anybody.”
Gavin came up behind her and grabbing her by the hair, smashed her face into the phone screen. There was a crazed look in his sunken eyes like nothing either Sammi or Kirsten had ever seen before. Blood was pouring down his face, from both his nose and his eyes, as Gavin pulled Kelly away and swung her hard against a nearby wall. There was a sickening *crack* that was audible even over the phone, and then Kelly collapsed to the floor.
The phone fell with her so that both girls could still see everything that was going on. Bending over his former girlfriend, Gavin lowered his head and ripped a big chunk out of the back of Kelly’s head as he bit into her flesh.
Kelly screamed…and then the connection was lost.
Sammi and Kirsten tried several times on both their phones to try and get back in touch, horrified at what they had just witnessed and just hoping it had all been some kind of a prank, but each time their phones failed to reconnect despite both having full bars.
Both girls then proceeded to try and phone 999.
Again the calls failed to go through.
All that came out the other end of their phones was a weird noise like neither of them had ever heard before that almost sounded a bit like - but wasn’t – a permanent engaged tone.
Sammi and Kirsten both looked at each other.
“What the hell is going on?” Both girls mouthed at each other, and both at the same time.
While Kirsten turned on the television, Sammi moved over to look out of their apartment floor window that currently showed a scene below that could have come directly out of a portrait of Hell.
Thick black smoke clouded the sky, coming from what looked like a number of fires that appeared to have broken out all over town. Crazed figures were running up and down the street outside, launching themselves at hapless passers by and attacking them, as those people in turn fled their homes from loved ones who had obviously been infected.
Just like Gavin.
As Sammi gazed down below, she saw a fire engine tear down the street - crazed figures hanging off it, trying desperately to get at the poor firemen inside as they and their vehicle rushed to answer a call. Whilst Sammi watched, the fire engine lost all control and veered into a crowd of pedestrians, throwing them all up into the air like ten pins in a bowling alley, before smashing into the wall of a nearby building.
As the firemen staggered out of their vehicle, they quickly found themselves under attack, but dazed and confused and still in shock as they were, put up little fight as the infected fell upon them like an angry horde and quickly started tearing them apart.
Sammi turned away, sickened, just as Kirsten called her over to the television with a “D, you really need to see this.”
Sammi joined her at the television set.
A crumpled and bedraggled looking news anchor was doing his best to stay calm as he read out the news. On the T.V he was talking about a series of Terrorist attacks that had just rocked the globe, and that appeared to be driving people mad and turning them all violently insane.
But it wasn’t just people caught up in the attacks that were turning violent, he was saying.
According to the World Health Organisation, and contrary to all the previous information they had released about the virus, it was also people who had previously tested positive for H1N1-Z who were in danger of becoming violent. People like Kelly’s boyfriend, Gavin.
What they had thought at first was just a few isolated incidents of violent behaviour was now seeming to be much more prevalent than they at first had thought and the World Health Organisation, the television reporter was saying, was now advising anyone in self-isolation with a loved one or family member diagnosed with H1N1-Z to remain in a separate room well away from them.
Patients who were H1N1-Z positive, according to the latest statement from WHO, as well as suffering from high fevers, headaches, and respiratory problems, in some extreme cases would fall into a fugue state and appear to stop breathing. If that happened, the official medical advice was to stay well away from them and not try to treat them, for in some instances patients could rise from that fugue state in an enhanced aggressive state and become violent.
“But now, back to the main news headlines,” the news anchor began saying. “Once again, a series of deadly Terrorist attacks have all struck all across the globe, and people in affected areas are being told to stay in their homes and continue to observe the ‘lockdown…”
Kirsten looked directly at Sammi.
“This can’t be real,” she said. “Surely, D. This can’t be real…this can’t be happening.”
Sammi took her friend by the arm, led her over to the window, and showed her the devastation and the chaos currently running amok in the streets below them.
Kirsten turned and looked back at Sammi.
“Fuck,” they both said at the same time.
***
That had been over a week ago.
Since then, the world had continued to fall apart.
The World’s governments had all mobilised their forces and were attempting to seize back control, to turn back the tide of the infected, but if one thing was quickly becoming self-evident, it was that the Dead were slowly winning the war.
Sammi and Kirsten lived in a two storey apartment building.
They lived upstairs in one flat whilst below, there lived another slighter older lady with two cats. On that first day, they’d gone downstairs to check on their neighbour, but there had been no answer when they’d knocked on her door.
Kirsten had pulled out the spare key the lady – Melissa, the girls thought her name was – had given them, so they could feed and look after her cats if she ever went away for the weekend to visit her parents, or wouldn’t be there for a couple of days as sometimes happened, and slipping the the key into the door, the two girls had let themselves in.
Kirsten was armed with a baseball bat, and Sammi was carrying a large chefs knife that was almost, but not quite, a machete.
They’d armed themselves just in case they encountered trouble.
They’d already seen plenty of people being attacked and bitten out on the street outside, and both girls knew from watching Zombie movies that once you got bitten, that was it.
Game over.
You became one of them.
Sammi and Kirsten weren’t about to take any chances.
“Hellooo…Melissa? Are you down here? It’s Sammi and Kirsten from upstairs, we’re just checking that you’re okay…” Kirsten had called out as they opened the front door and entered the flat.
There was no reply.
Sammi and Kirsten had checked every room, but fortunately the apartment was empty.
Apart from the two cats.
There was no sign of Melissa.
“Maybe she popped out?” Sammi suggested. “Popped to the shops or something?”
Kirsten nodded. “Maybe,” she said. “I hope she’s alright - it’s bloody chaos out there and I wouldn’t want to be out there with all those things wandering about attacking everything.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Sammi said, doing her best to try and reassure her friend. Their neighbour’s two cats curled around their legs, purring, obviously pleased to see them both after being left all alone. “I’m more concerned about her two cats right now. What are they going to do if she doesn’t come back?”
“We’re not taking them in,” Kirsten said, warning her friend now. “I’ve got allergies and besides, some of my stuff is expensive and cost me a lot of money. The last thing I want is cat fur all over my designer clothes.”
She opened up a tin of food and split it between both cats while Sammi changed their cat bowl and provided them with fresh water.
“You don’t have allergies,” Sammi told her as she did so.
“Yeah, well they’re still not coming back upstairs with us. If you’re worried about them being stuck inside, we can open a window for them till their owner gets back so they can come and go as they please,” Kirsten said. “And as for allergies? I so do have them, what would you even know?”
“But what if they get attacked by Zombies?” Sammi asked her.
“Oh puleassee,” Kirsten responded. “We’ve watched enough movies. Zombies don’t attack animals, they just go for humans and besides, cats are pretty self-sufficient and pretty good at adapting and looking after themselves too.
“I’m sure they’ll be fine.
“I mean it, D. We’re not taking them in.”