by Woods, Mark
“THEM!” Melissa pointed back the way she’d just come as the infected abandoned the man they’d just murdered and started coming after her, into the store.
“Holy crap!” The young store assistant turned towards the other customers who, having just passed through the checkouts, were now approaching the exit to the store where he and Melissa were standing.
“Back,” he cried out to them. “Everybody get back, away from the doors!”
“What’s going on?” Asked the skinhead that Melissa had assaulted earlier, still rubbing his sore and bloodshot eyes. “What’s that bitch doing back in here?”
One of the infected passed Melissa and the store assistant by a hairs breadth and leapt at the skinhead, forcing him down to the floor as his attacker proceeded to bite into his face.
Melissa could hear the *crunch* of cartilage and bone even from where she was standing. More of the infected were rapidly following, she noted, and two of them were now heading their way.
“Is there a back entrance to the store?” She demanded, shaking the young store assistant to get his attention. “A loading bay, or some kind of back exit?”
The two began running towards the back of the store, closely followed by those customers who were finally starting to twig something was wrong.
“We’ll never get over to it in time,” the store assistant said, continually glancing back to see how far back their attackers were which was slowing them both down. “But there’s a door here that’ll take us up the back stairs to the main office and staff room.”
He began to key in a code onto an electronic keypad.
Melissa could already hear the screams of other customers being attacked far behind them, but not that far, she suddenly realised. Those things would soon be in them again.
The store assistant cursed as he put the number in wrong.
“Do you think this is anything to do with those Terrorist attacks earlier?” One of the customers standing with them asked.
“What Terrorist attacks?” Melissa asked. “I don’t follow the news.”
It was too grim and depressing, she thought.
She’d stopped watching days ago after she realised there were no new updates, and that the Prime Minister was only repeating the same old rhetoric over and over every day. ‘Stay in your homes, and all this will all be over a lot sooner.’
“There have been a number of Terrorist attacks all over the globe causing ordinary people to turn violent,” the customer was saying. “It all happened a couple of hours ago, how can you not have heard about it?”
“I told you, I don’t watch the news,” she turned to the store assistant as he put in the number wrong again. “Get out of the way, what’s the code? Let me do it.”
The assistant stepped aside. “Two, two, three, three, four, four, seven, eight, nine,” he said. Melissa quickly typed in the numbers first time and the door opened.
“If you want something doing…”she muttered. “Inside, both of you!”
There were other customers heading their way now, Melissa saw, but they would never make it in time. It looked like some of the customers who had been previously attacked were now getting back to their feet and joining the affray, she thought, but she could have been mistaken.
Everything was all moving so fast.
The other customer beside them screamed as one of the infected came out of an aisle and launched itself at him.
The store assistant pushed her inside and shut the door behind them both.
“Keep quiet, come with me, and maybe we both might stand a chance…” he told her.
Now…
“I’ve been hiding upstairs ever since,” Melissa said, helping them to load up the car by quite literally chucking everything inside – both in the boot and across the back seat. Sammi and Kirsten had fought hard for what they’d taken, and weren’t about to leave it behind, but knew time was against them and the man’s buddies could come back any second.
Kirsten was behind the front seat, key in the ignition ready to go, but not starting the engine yet because she knew they might need whatever fuel they had left, and had no idea when, or even if, they’d be able to fill up the tank again.
It was just under half-full right now - more than enough to get them back to their flat, but not enough if they ended up being chased all over town trying to lose their pursuers rather than leading them back to their apartment.
“Can you two hurry up,” she hissed. Looking all around and keeping one ear out for the sound of bikes.
“The store assistant left me three days later,” Melissa continued. “Said he was going for help and I never saw him again. I don’t even know what happened to him. Those guys arrived three days ago and set up camp in the store.
“They left the infected wandering the store as a deterrent to anyone who thought about looting it, figuring no-one would risk coming in. They came upstairs and hung around in the staff room, so I sneaked out and started hiding out in the coffee shop area.
“They never even came in there. They were more interested in raiding the alcohol aisle, getting drunk and partying.
“They never even knew I was there.
“They all went out a couple of hours ago, just drove off on their bikes.
“I was thinking about leaving, heading off on my own, but when I heard your music, I thought it was them come back at first.
“Then I looked out and couldn’t see their bikes. So I snuck down, grabbed a knife from one of the aisles, and that’s when I saw one of them on his own confronting your two and decided to make my move.”
“Lucky you did,” Sammi said. She, too, was keeping one ear out for the sound of bikes. So far the only Undead she could see were lumbering around the edges of the car park, headed towards them but slowly.
Very slowly.
Thankfully none of them so far appeared to be the fast kind.
The last of the shopping was finally in the car.
“Jump in the back seat,” Sammi told Melissa. “I’m taking shotgun.”
As they moved round the car, a previously unseen Z, clad in what looked like cricket gear of all things, came lumbering out of the shadows of the store and clumsily threw itself at Melissa, landing on her from behind, and throwing her to the floor.
Before Sammi could react, the Z had lifted Melissa’s head by the hair, and began smashing her face into the ground repeatedly, leaving it a bloody mess.
Melissa waved one hand at her in a futile gesture and through swollen lips and a broken nose, pleaded with Sammi to please help her.
Sammi swing her axe at the Z, but it simply hit the cricket helmet the creature was wearing and bounced off, doing no damage.
Kirsten had left the car and came round the other side, swinging her bat and knocking the Z off their neighbour, but as he rolled off her, he took with him a big chunk of Melissa’s flesh where he had bitten into her neck.
From the pool of blood steadily spreading all around her, both girls could see she was already dead and there was nothing left either of them could now do for her.
From the store, the other guy – the biker whose throat Melissa had slit – started lumbering out towards them, moaning, his arms stretched out wide as if hugging an invisible bear.
“Time to go!” Kirsten told her friend. Sammi just stood there, looking down at their former downstairs neighbour as the Z in the cricket gear started getting back to its feet. She thought she saw Melissa starting to twitch, then realised that in less than a minute their neighbour would be back on her feet as well.
But no longer alive…
Back as one of them…
“Get in the car, D!” Kirsten shouted at her again. “Now!”
She was already back round the driver’s side and about to climb in.
Sammi broke out of her reverie, threw her axe in the back seat, and quickly climbed into the passenger side.
“GO, GO, GO…” she told her friend.
As Kirsten started the ignition, they b
oth thought they could hear the sound of a group of motorbikes headed towards them, roaring down the nearby A47.
In less than a minute, Sammi thought, they would be coming down the slip road, would come speeding round the roundabout, and then would be here – here in the carpark with them.
Luckily the Mini started first time.
The sound of AC DC’s Big Gun started sounding from the stereo as the two girls pulled away, swerving to avoid a couple of Zs on their way out of the carpark.
They barely made it in time.
As they spun round the roundabout and headed off down the road leading back to their apartment building, Sammi thought she saw the first of the bikes coming round the roundabout behind them in the rearview mirror.
That was a bit too close for comfort, she thought.
Tears were running down both cheeks. Kirsten, she saw, was crying as well.
Though neither of them had been that close to their downstairs neighbour, Melissa had still been someone they knew. Someone they saw every other day and nodded too, even though they might not always talk.
And they had known her well enough to look after her cats.
“Oh God, Melissa…” Sammi whimpered.
Kirsten reached over and took her hand, leaving just one hand on the wheel.
“There’s nothing we could have done, D,” she said. “Nothing we could have done.”
Sammi nodded, knowing her friend was right.
As they drove back to their flat, no longer speaking, Sammi gazed out of the passenger side window.
It was just them again now, she thought. Just the two of them, like Bonnie and Clyde, Butch and Sundance, Thelma and Louise.
Just the two of them - looking out for one another just like they’d always done.
Sisters of the Z-pocalypse.
Chapter thirteen: Stuck on the roof (continued)
Day 6
Did you ever have that dream where you start losing teeth and are so convinced that it’s true that when you wake up, you check them all only to find that they are still there? Well nowadays, I have the opposite dream. Sometimes I dream that I still have all my teeth, and then in the morning when I awake, I find I’ve lost another during the night.
Last night, I lost another two teeth. That’s four in total in the last few weeks. My only mate from the old days that is still left alive, Billy, told me the other day that it’s one of the symptoms of Scurvy.
I am not so sure about that.
I don’t think it’s Scurvy causing so many people’s teeth to fall out. I think it has just as much to do with the fact that none of us are cleaning our teeth any more than anything else. Still, while it is true that many of us living up here on the roof have all started suffering from one kind of malnutrition or another, it’s not like there’s a hell of a lot any of us can do about it.
Every day we wake up alive is just one more day to be thankful for.
It could be worse.
We could be dead, and one of them…
One of the things that makes me think it isn’t Scurvy is because many of us still manage to eat a regular diet of fresh vegetables, thanks to the small rooftop garden that some of the more green-fingered residents among us have taken to looking after. Our vegetable garden originally belonged to a Mr.Garrison who used to grow his own vegetables up here on the building’s roof so he could sell them at the local Farmers Market. Now, with food slowly getting scarcer, we have really come to rely on whatever vegetables we can grow and all things considered, we have had fairly good results so far.
It’s not just the rooftop vegetable garden we have going either. A few months after Z-Day, a group of us were going through some of the abandoned apartments, removing doors for firewood, looting cupboards etc…when we discovered a fairly substantial Hydroponics set-up in one of the flats below. From what we could tell, it had been used to grow large quantities of weed - and boy, how I wish that I had known now about that back when Z-Day all first kicked off. I don’t know much about Hydroponics and shit - I mean I was just an illustrator for Christ’s sakes - but from what little I do understand, this set-up has helped immensely in helping to boost our supply of fresh fruit and vegetables the the last couple of years or so by speeding up the time it takes them to grow.
Though food has started to get a little short of late despite our best efforts, I am reassured by the fact that it could’ve been a hell of a lot worse. A couple of times in the past two years, a few of us have managed to leave the building and scope out the local area using Mr. Singh’s van. It was on one of these first scavenging trips that we managed to grab a load of packets of vegetable seeds and equipment from a local gardening store and it is largely because of this, that we have managed to grow as much fresh produce the past couple of years as we have. Though its true, the vegetable garden has not always produced as much as we would have liked, it is surprising how the extra food that we have managed to grow has helped stretch out our canned and tinned food a little further. And, if nothing else, it has meant that none of us have had to start on any of the pet food, not yet!
Though it is true both our last couple of supply runs nearly ended in disaster, leading us to decide not to risk any more, thankfully we never lost anyone to the Zombies on either of those occasions. But what we saw of what has happened to our neighbourhood whilst we were out there is not good. Things have deteriorated pretty badly out there and it looks very much like now, we could be the last actual life left for hundreds of miles all around.
Another thing, since our last supply run, the number of dead surrounding our Tower Block seems to have increased by about a hundredfold too. Even if we wanted to, I very much doubt that that any other supply runs would be possible. What little food we have left now, we are just going to have to try and make last...
Day 7
A couple of nights ago, Mr. Singh was talking. He had this idea for how we could take back the cities and reclaim them from the Dead. His idea was that if we could fix a series of rope ladders to bridge the gaps across buildings, we could all live on the roofs, much like we have learnt to do here on the top of our tower block, and never have to go back down. We could set up rooftop gardens, just like we have done here, collect rainwater for drinking and bathing, and become totally self-sufficient without ever having to set another foot back down on the ground where the Dead currently wait for us.
At first, initially, a few people dismissed his idea, but then Dante spoke up and said he thought Mr.Singh might just have stumbled onto something. Why couldn’t we do something like that up here? He asked. Our tower block stands on its own, but there are a couple of empty buildings fairly close to us - office blocks that before Z-day, were in the process of being considered to be made into apartments, that we could probably reach with a fairly long ladder.
We have seen no Dead on the rooftops opposite ours, so there is a good chance those buildings might be clear of the Undead. But as you might imagine, so far no one has wanted to take the risk of even attempting to reach any of the other buildings - not least because there are too many variables.
What if we dropped the ladder, for example? And what if the buildings near us have been compromised and are already occupied by the Dead and we just haven’t seen them?
And then there is the question of which of us would be the first to cross the ladder and check if whatever building we chose was safe? What if something went wrong? With so many Dead below us, understandably nobody is keen on being the first to try crossing a ladder to the next building and falling to their death, but Dante alone remains keen for us to at least try.
His argument is that it wouldn’t hurt to have a possible escape route off this tower block should anything ever happen, and the Dead finally manage to break their way in past our barricades and find their way up to the roof. Just because it hasn’t happened so far, he reckons, doesn’t mean it couldn’t one day. And it probably wouldn’t hurt either to have a second base of operations, not to mention another rooftop garden – n
ot just so we could grow more fresh vegetables, but also so what little is left of our stock and supplies isn’t all in one place. His argument is that if the tower block was ever infiltrated and we did have to leave, right now we would have to leave behind everything we have worked for these past two years. At least if we had a ladder or a rope bridge to the next building over and more supplies over there, Dante argues, then in the absolute worst scenario we could all evacuate over to the next building, either cut down the rope bridge or remove the ladder that provided passage between our two buildings, and still remain safe and relatively well off in terms of supplies.
Don’t tell Dante I said this, Diary, but part of me actually thinks he may have a point. I’m just a bit surprised it’s taken so long for anyone to think of this, or even consider it – but then, for too long now the days, and weeks, and even months have all blended into one. The past year seems to have gone by so quickly, and while sometimes it feels like we have been up for like forever, at the same time, sometimes it still feels like Z-day was only yesterday and everything else that has happened in between has all been a dream.
The only problem with Dante and Mr.Singh’s idea is that we are not sure yet if we even have enough rope to make a rope bridge. And even if we do, no one really seems to know much about how to go about constructing a rope bridge anyway.
We do have a long maintenance ladder that extends, but whether that will be long enough to reach to the next building over still remains to be seen.
This probably goes some way to explaining why no-one else has come up with this idea before now. Whilst in theory, to begin with, it all sounded like a good plan, a strong plan, it is beginning to look like actually putting it into practice might prove to be a bit more of a challenge.
Though he has managed to more than prove his value in the past, almost everyone has come to regard Mr.Singh’s foolish ideas of escape to be nothing more than a pipe-dream; a harmless way of trying maintain some kind of hope and restore belief that everything will all be okay.
No one thinks his idea will ever come to fruition.