Fear of the Dead (Novella): Contagion

by Woods, Mark

  Except Dante.

  Dante seems convinced that there must be a way to make Mr. Singh’s idea work.

  But out of the two of them, none of the rest of us are sure which one is the more deluded...

  Chapter fourteen: Stuck on the roof (continued)

  Day 8

  Tonight it is my turn to go on Watch. About six months ago, the Dead managed to break through the blockades at the front entrance to our building through sheer weight of numbers and since then, we have had to block the stairwells and give up the first few floors of the Tower Block for lost.

  We still have access to the underground garages underneath the building by way of a back stairwell, but as the exit gates there are now blocked by an impenetrable wall of Zombies too, it doesn’t look like we will be getting out that way any time soon either.

  Our Watch patrols consist of three shifts of guards, taking it in turns every few hours to patrol in twos throughout the night along the roof and down into the halls below, and then down to the blockades in the stairwell to ensure that no more floors have become compromised and that the Dead remain trapped where they are, safe behind our makeshift barriers. The idea of patrolling the roof was originally to look out for any air traffic we could signal in the hope we might get rescued. But it has been a long, long time since we last saw anything in the sky and the last plane any of us saw was shortly after Z-Day when one crashed into a building several miles away; exploding into a ball of flames we could feel even from here.

  Sometimes I can’t help thinking that at least those people in the plane died quickly rather than being left trapped up here....but that is one of those thoughts that I probably shouldn’t share and is probably best kept between myself and this journal.

  It is almost time for me to go now but, before I do, you’re probably wondering what happened to all that weed I mentioned earlier that we found in the empty apartment with the Hydroponics? I’d like to say we shared it out and smoked it but the truth is we took a vote and had ourselves a little bonfire. Even though the smoke was blowing in the other direction, everyone agreed later that they still got a little high from the fumes. One thing I do remember about that night though, is that all of us shared the best night’s sleep that any of us have ever had since Z-Day. Tell you what though, that weed sure did give us all some pretty weird dreams...

  Man, I still wish I had some of that weed now.

  Day 9

  One thing I have not discussed much so far in this journal is the constant noise from below.

  Ever since the Zombies first realised we were up here, their numbers have gradually increased. For a brief while, this tapered off - allowing us an opportunity to head out into the city looking for supplies - but in the last six months or so, their numbers have slowly begun to increase again to the point that now when you look out across the city, all you can see below you is a sea of Living Dead.

  You would not believe the noise they make.

  At night, those of us who still sleep in the apartments below are plagued by the sound of their cries echoing up the stairwells. Some time ago now, we removed most of the doors from the apartments below to allow more light to pass through the halls, and so we could use the wood from the doors for firewood; not to mention to help strengthen the barricades below as well. With nothing now to act as a barrier, the haunting moans of the Zombies constantly echo throughout the whole building at night with nothing to stop them and nowhere for you to go to get away from them.

  And then there is the smell.

  Though the decomposition process appears to have slowed down in the Reanimated Dead, (maybe as a side effect of the virus, I don’t know) still it is a fact that our Undead neighbours are not the sweetest smelling of creatures. Not that any of us can talk, without any soap now, the Zombies aren’t the only things around here that smell...

  The biggest risk to our health now, other than malnutrition, is the risk of infection or getting ill. All bodily waste has to be disposed of over one side of the building, well away from any of the tents that have been erected both for the Watch Patrol to rest between guard shifts and anyone else who wants to sleep up here on the roof, rather than below in the empty apartments.

  In the first year we were trapped atop this Tower Block, we lost five people because they fell ill and we could not treat them. Medication up here is in short supply and extremely limited. How we have not lost more people through illness, I honestly do not know. All we have in the way of medicine are a few antibiotics that are now out of date and some pain pills. On both the short supply runs that we made, we never found any medication. All the pharmacies and chemists in the area had all been long stripped bare and nothing was left but a few feminine hygiene products and some condoms...

  Katie, whom I was particularly close to, was the first to die and was killed by a burst appendix. The memory of her passing forever haunts me but I don’t want to talk about her any more. Tom, whom I had known only in passing before Z-Day, had heart problems and one day suffered a heart attack and died before anyone could reach him. We lost two more people whose names I never even knew that first winter and they both died of pneumonia and finally, the last person we lost was a young girl named Sarah who was epileptic, had a fit and died because she had run out of her medication. I was lucky - I didn’t get to see her go. Watching Katie die was more than enough for me to handle. And there I go talking about her again. I swore I wouldn’t do that!

  The others that we have lost in the time since have all been suicides. Some took their lives by choosing to hang themselves in their apartments or, in a few cases, overdosing on prescription pain pills that they had kept hidden for just such an occasion. A few others still, threw themselves over the edge to join the ranks of the Living Dead. I don’t know how they can have done that. I can think of no worse way to go and can only think that they couldn’t have been in their right minds at the time. No one ever talks about those who have chosen their own way out. It is just one more thing people have decided not to talk about...

  On those occasions when we do find bodies, something none of us look forward to, we all pull straws to decide who is going to dispose of their lifeless corpses and throw them over the side. The first thing we have to do though is destroy the head with a fire axe so that they don’t come back. It is not a nice way of disposal by any means but it is the only way to stop them from returning. One consolation, and it’s horrible saying this but it’s true, when we do feed bodies to the Dead, they do seem to halt their moaning for a while. It’s not a nice thing to think about, so for the most part we don’t, but I think we all share a bit of guilty relief when we discover someone else has gone – not least because it means more food for those of us who are left, but also because it means we get a short respite from all the moaning. When Katie died, I was the one who volunteered to see to her disposal. It was the hardest thing I have ever done and....shit now you’ve got me crying....I wish I could just go back and erase this whole page.

  Day 10

  This is not at all how I imagined a Zombie Apocalypse would be.

  It is so not the Zombie apocalypse I asked for.

  Not that I ever really thought about it or considered a Zombie apocalypse to be a genuine possibility, but ever since I can remember, I have always been a bit of a Zombie geek. I used to watch all of the movies starting with the original black and white Night of the Living Dead through to Resident Evil, and played all the computer games from Dead Rising through to Dead Island and everything in between. My favourite books were always Zombie horror stories too and some of my favourite authors included the likes of Catt Dahman, Matt Brooks and Brian Keene amongst many others.

  One of my dreams was to one day get a commission to design a cover for one of their books. I’m telling you - I lived for that shit, man, and always thought if the day ever came when Zombies turned out to be real, then I would most definitely be prepared...

  But real life isn’t anything at all like fiction. All that Zombie knowledge I accu
mulated over the years has ended up proving worthless, stuck up here on the rooftop of this tower block, unable to escape. Just for a start, in fiction they always seem to somehow have access to guns. In the whole of our building we have only ever found one gun and that was in that drug dealer’s apartment where we found the Hydroponics. Here in the U.K, unless you happen to be a farmer or are in a gang or something, guns just aren’t that readily accessible. Then again, in fiction no one ever mentions the fact that every time you need to either shit or piss, you might have to do it either over the side of a building, which is not glamorous in the slightest and can be extremely messy, or in a bucket which is even less appealing.

  And that’s not to mention the sheer and total boredom. No-one ever mentions that in any of the books or films either.

  With no Internet, no computer, no music to entertain you, there are whole parts of the day when there simply isn’t anything to do and you find your whole existence revolving around just eating, shitting, and sleeping. And trust me, with food in short supply, the last thing you want to be doing is thinking about eating, believe me! That’s one of the quickest ways to drive yourself mad!

  For a while, me and my mate Billy used to entertain ourselves by chucking stuff over the side of the building at the Zombies such as television sets, old fridges etc but all that kind of stopped when Dante told us both to grow up and stop being so juvenile. Sometimes I think the boredom could be another of the reasons why some people up here decide to just end up killing themselves. To take their own lives.

  They just run out of things to do and get bored, and then decide there’s just nothing left for them to live for.

  I can kind of see their point, but I don’t think I’m quite at that stage just yet…

  If nothing else, just writing in this journal every day is helping to keep me sane.

  Day 11

  Last night, I awoke to find myself walking towards the edge of the building without even realising what I was doing. Billy was on Night Watch and managed to stop me before I got too close to the edge, but told me later, in confidence, that I am not the first person to have been caught doing this recently; coming close to throwing myself over the side, seemingly in my sleep. Apparently no-one is supposed to talk about it happening because Dante and Mr. Singh don’t want anyone being more worried than they are already. But Mr. Singh and Dante have both caught people sleep-walking towards the edge on more than one occasion, and now have begun to suspect that not all of the suicides we’ve had since we’ve been up here may have been intentional.

  Some of those people who have taken their own lives, they suspect, might not have even been aware of their actions at the time.

  Bill told me that he heard Dante and Mr.Singh talking the other night, when they thought everyone else was asleep. They were both on Night Watch, but Billy couldn’t sleep and had gone up on the roof to get some air.They didn’t know he was there, and Billy kept himself very quiet so he could listen in on their conversation once he realised they’d deliberately gone over to the far corner of the roof where they thought no-one else could hear.

  At first, he thought it was all nothing and that what he heard that night was just Dante and Mr.Singh spitballing, but since my own sleepwalking episode, now Billy is starting to get worried that there’s more going on than either Dante and Mr.Singh are telling us.

  Anyway, apparently what Dante and Mr.Singh were talking about the other night is how they think that the Zombies might be starting to evolve. Billy says he heard them discussing how the numbers of Living Dead around us have increased in the last year, almost as if they are calling out to each other and summoning their brethren, announcing to their fellow Dead that we are up here, trapped, all alone.

  This is not a new idea and one I have even shared myself in these pages. But Billy also heard Dante claiming the other night, that a few times watching them, he has witnessed them trying to climb up on top of each other as if seemingly trying to climb up the side of the building to get closer to where we are.

  Billy said that at the time, he dismissed what he’d heard as nonsense, but ever since that night, he’s started to watch the Dead more carefully himself and he’s started to notice unusual behaviour patterns as well.

  He says if you watch them closely enough, and for long enough, it is almost like the Dead are watching you back. He says he has seen them, following people crossing the roof with their once dead eyes, and on occasion he himself has crossed over to another part of the roof, only to see the same Zombies watching him from below that he swears, earlier, were watching him from the other side of the building. Almost like they were tracking him, and had pushed their way through the horde to follow where he went.

  I know. Sounds ridiculous, right?

  Sounds paranoid?

  But after being up here for so long, can you really blame any of us for starting to get a little paranoid? For anthropomorphising the Dead and starting to attribute motives and reasoning to their actions?

  After all, they’ve been our only neighbours for some time now. They’ve been the only thing we’ve had to look at this past couple of years, so surely it’s understandable if some of us have started imaging things?

  But what if it’s not just our imagination? What if they are starting to evolve and develop some kind of reasoning? What then?

  Is it really that crazy to imagine the Zombies might be starting to evolve to the point where they have begun to co-operate with each other?

  And if so, what does that mean for us????

  I mean there is no way the Zs are ever going to be able to reach us by climbing on top of each other to get to the top of this building, we all know that, but still…

  How worrying is it to think that such actions, if they are actually happening, seem to suggest that some kind of learning process might be going on, far beyond and in excess of what you might expect from what is essentially nothing more than a walking corpse...

  Which brings me to the next point that Billy says he overheard the other night.

  Apparently Dante said he had been talking to one of the tenants up here who claims he used to be a Sound Engineer in his former life (Billy didn’t catch the name of the resident, so I don’t know who it was), and he’d asked Dante if anyone else up here had noticed the Zombie moans starting to change in pitch since we have all been trapped up here. According to this resident, the pitch and tone of the Zombie’s moans have altered and lowered slightly since we first barricaded ourselves up here, so that now there is a notable difference to their moans than there was in the beginning, and Billy says he heard Dante say that he ‘believed him, because the man obviously knows what he’s talking about.’

  After that, Billy says he heard Dante talking to Mr.Singh about ‘Alpha’ and ‘Theta’ waves or something and how, before Z-Day, he knew certain Cognitive and Behavioural Therapists who would often use audio tapes to help put their patients into a relaxed, hypnotic and more suggestive state.

  Is that what the Zombies are trying to do? Are they slowly trying to mesmerise us with their moans? Gently lull us into walking off the edge of the building so that we fall into their arms and they can more easily feed upon us?

  I know, right? I know how it sounds, believe me…

  It all sounds far-fetched. It all sounds unlikely, and a massive stretch of the imagination but then just think, a few years ago, we would have never have believed half the things that we have seen happen since Z-Day! Who amongst us would ever have believed that we would ever really actually live to see Zombies for real and not just as a product of some author’s wild imagination?

  I want to say that everything Billy heard is just paranoia....and yet, Billy also told me that out of all of the people that Dante has spoken to about their recent sleep-walking, none admitted to ever having sleep-walked before now.

  And I have never sleep-walked before the other night, ever. I know this for a fact.

  Could it be possible?

  Could it be true?

 
; Has it come to the point where the Dead are no longer just content to sit and wait for us anymore, and instead are now are trying to actively encourage us to come to them through subliminal messages hidden in their moans?

  During the day, it is easy to laugh such things off. But at night, suddenly these thoughts no longer seem so ridiculous. I have almost become afraid to fall asleep...almost.

  I must confess, I didn’t think our situation up here could ever get much worse.

  Now, ever since my conversation with Billy, I have started to believe I was wrong.

  And that then begs the question.

  What else are Dante and Mr.Singh not telling us?

  Day 12

  In just over a week, I have nearly filled this small notebook with my musings and there are only a couple of pages of paper left. I never expected to find myself writing so much about our current situation up here and yet, I must admit, I have found it more than a little bit cathartic and much more therapeutic than I ever would have imagined. But I’m not done yet; I still have one or two last thoughts left to share before I run completely out of paper...

  Long before all this happened, I remember reading this article on-line that lamented the way that Zombie stories always seemed so dark and devoid of any hope. How Zombies were always used as a way of reflecting the everyday fears of our society, and as a metaphor for all the things that we were truly afraid of in our lives. This article also went on to say how the author wished that a few more of these stories would carry more of a message of hope, and that it was because they were always so bleak and depressing to read that he largely avoided them. That if Zombie fiction was going to continue to be used as an escape from all Society’s problems, then surely the authors of such stories almost had a responsibility to be a bit more positive and convey more of a message of hope. To demonstrate and show that even in our darkest hours, there often still remains a single spark of light.