by James King
At last it came. The big zombie threw back its head and howled at the sky, a vicious lupine sound, full of hunger and hate. Then he lowered his head, his eyes blazing, his jaws grinning, the madness of the living dead strong upon him. And then he turned, and shambled off down the tarmac, between the gravel driveways, graceful elms, and expensive detached houses of Pulmer Street. And the other dead followed him, moving as once, a slumping, dribbling, moaning cell of death. This cell was soon joined by others – other corpses that had risen from other graves, or else the recent living who had been freshly turned: killed and then returned to life again by the Necromancer Virus. Soon they were legion, an army of stinking carrion whose only desire was to invade the sweet and juicy realm of living flesh.
On the pavement just outside Chandler’s Blooms, the remains of Nick Richards twitched, the head that was still attached to a red tail of vertebra rolled and moaned and, like some huge obscene slug, it tried to crawl along the tarmac, to join its brethren at the feeding ground.
* * *
“Holy shit, man, fucking unreal!”
When he stepped out of the front door of his apartment block and onto the pavement of Alchester High Street, young Carl Baker could not believe what he was seeing. Zombies. Fucking zombies, man. They were doing a zombie walk in Alchester High Street, and he – the biggest zombie fan in the universe – had been left out of it.
He had been awakened at about half passed nine that morning – way too early for him – by the sound of a strange commotion going on in the street below. Hollering, shouting, a strange kind of moaning sound, the kind of sound that people with mental problems sometimes make: sort of creepy. Carl had rolled over in his bed and pulled the duvet tight around him – the allure of sleep being far stronger at that moment than any interest he might have had with what was going on outside. It was just some dickheads cutting up rough about something, having a bit of a barny - although Carl had had to admit that it was more normal for that shit to happen on a Saturday night on Alchester High Street rather than a Monday morning. Still, he’d rolled over and bunched the duvet around his head and waited for sleep to lull him back off into the land of never.
But then the screaming started.
Loud, urgent, agonised: desperate. Holy shit, what the fuck was going on? With any chance for sleep finally gone; Carl had finally thrown the covers back, scrambled out of bed, and then had lurched, somewhat zombie like himself, across to the curtained window. As he lurched, he passed the shelves stacked with Zombie DVDs – Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Beyond, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead. The Walking Dead DVD box set – to name but a few. He passed the walls that were festooned with posters for said films, and a hundred more besides, plus shelves of Zombie figurines, rubber zombie masks, and a hundred other zombie-based accessories. And books, of course. World War z, Apocalypse Z, The Rising, How to Survive a Zombie Outbreak, and five hundred more titles in which the letter Z was so profuse that it almost made you dizzy.
Yeah, it was fair to say that Carl Baker was sizable zombie fan.
And so, when he finally made it to the window, and drew the curtains back, and gazed out upon the street below, there was a certain quickening of the pulse, a heavier breathing, a spark of adrenalin that ignited in his stomach and set his veins afire.
People were down there on the street. People lurching, staggering, moaning and shambling in a decidedly zombie-like fashion. They looked like zombies, too – green-faced, skeleton jawed, clutching bony hands, ragged graveyard clothes. And blood too! Blood running on the tarmac, blood dribbling down chins, blood splattering upward onto walls. And entrails: sausages coated in fake blood of course, but realistic looking. Zombies crouching, munching: fighting over the scraps. Christ, this wasn’t just a zombie walk. This was full-on zombie gut munching carnage. Maybe they were making a film or something.
Hurriedly, desperately – perhaps faster than he had ever done anything in his life – Carl threw his clothes on. Jeans, black Metallica t-shirt, sneakers, and then he fled out of his flat, pounding down the stairs, flying through the front doors, and then pausing on the pavement. And there they were – here, there everywhere.
Zombies. Fucking zombies, man. The biggest fucking most full-on zombie walk in the history of the universe and by Christ he’d almost missed it. And by God did it look convincing.
Carl couldn’t count how many of the zombie walkers there were. It looked like hundreds, maybe even thousands. They shambled down Alchester High Street in a giant mass of green, grey skin: heads hanging, arms dangling, feet dragging, limbs jerking at odd and awkward angles. Hell, Carl had never seen it done quite this convincingly before. He been in New York once when they’d done a mass zombie walk down Fifth Avenue, and that had been spectacular to be sure. But this made the New York gig look like something that the local Amateur Dramatic society might put on. Some of the zombie faces even looked like skulls – and not just painted-on skulls either, but actual teeth grinning bone-projecting, eyeless skulls for Heaven’s sake. How in hell had they achieved that effect? In a way, it was almost a bit too real.
And then there was the blood... because, Carl quickly realised, this wasn’t just a zombie walk. This was a zombie killing. An all out fucking Zombie slaying! Even as he watched, he saw a woman fleeing toward him. He quickly realised who she was: Mrs Fitzgibbons who worked the till on the local Tesco. He often went there for beer and pizza, (when, that is, he was feeling particularly flush), and he and Mrs F often exchanged pleasantries about the weather, the economy, whether he’d got himself a job yet, and other such items of irredeemable boredom. Carl had bought a zombie DVD from Tesco once, and Mrs F had served him, wrinkling her nose at the slavering rotting-corpse cover, but finally selling it to him in an oh-well-if-you-must-have-it kind of way. Now Mrs F was running down the pavement, three Z’s hot her heels. She saw Carl and started screaming:
“Carl, oh Carl, help me Carl, they’re gonna kill me, Carl, I can’t believe these crazy people, they’re gonna- ,”
- but Mrs F never got to say what else they were gonna, because the Z’s caught up with her, tore her down to the pavement, and began to dismember her. Blood gushed upward, entrails were unfurled, and one Z lurched off with one dripping, raw-stumped arm in its clutches. Hell yeah! That was just like it was in the movies. How did they do that? SF – fucking – X, man. And what about Mrs F? She was about the last person in the known universe who Carl would imagine ever getting involved in a zombie walk or a zombie anything. Maybe they’d paid her a goodish chunk of money, just to be an extra or something like that. But even then, Carl would have never have suspected that the lady was such a damn good actor.
If she was acting... spoke a voice in his mind, and if it is fake blood, and if it is prosthetics, and if this is a Zombie walk at all and not actually...well... real...
It couldn’t be real of course. Things like this just didn’t happen outside of movies, TV shows, and books. But still, there were other little items of sensory information that were presenting themselves to Carl in the seconds since he had stepped outside, that were, slowly but surely, beginning to support the theory that this might actually be more than just some crazy stunt pulled by a bunch of hardcore zombie fans. First there were the people. The other people, as well as Mrs F. The people like Bob Butler who ran the butchers shop over the road, currently lying on his back on the pavement, fighting off two Zs with no success at all, the blood blooming across his white apron not just from the steaks and offal that he cut up in his shop. People like Mrs Parkin, the town librarian, being hauled out of her car through the window, fighting, screaming, her flesh being pulled apart, the claret flowing. People like Brett Miller who ran the newsagent down by the corner, writhing on the pavement, his head actually, (oh Jesus God, how the hell did they do that!) his head actually being pulled off his body. And more people besides - people, people, people... it looked as though the entire good town of Alchester was in on thi
s particular prank – and how in the name of God could that ever be possible? How could an entire town conspire to do a zombie walk?
And then there was the smell. When he had first stepped out of the apartment block, Carl had presumed that it odour that hit his nostrils was bad drains, or maybe the wheelie bins that were out in the alley behind the block, (Carl was always forgetting to put his out on collection day, reducing the bins to festering mass of fast food boxes and pizza rinds). But hell, that smell was ripe! It was more than garbage or blocked drains. It smelled like honest-to-god rotting meat, like that time when Carl had dropped a sausage behind the kitchen unit and hadn’t been able to get it out for two whole weeks. Thick, noisome, festering and flyblown. Carl put a hand to his mouth and felt his gorge do a small but ominous flip.
Movement to his left. Carl whirled around and there, staggering down the pavement toward him, was one of the zombies. A man, his Z-outfit making him look excessively rotted, almost like a skeleton. Blood, and a kind of odd and decidedly sick-looking black liquid drooled from its jaws. It wasn’t anyone he knew – at least he couldn’t recognise them beneath all of that mouldy green makeup – but he none the less nodded and smiled his appreciation.
“Hey, like the makeup, man,” said Carl doing a thumbs up, “how did you guys get to look so realistic. I mean, man – I’ve seen some good Z makeup in my time – I went on a zombie walk in NY once, and that was eye popping I can tell you – but this is something else. I mean, you must have got a movie SFX man to do it, and a good one at that. So who? Rick Baker? Rob Bottin? Some other dude who I’ve never heard of but is even better than them? Come on, dude, spill the beans!”
The zombie-man didn’t spill the beans, but he did lean back his skeleton head and offer an inarticulate moan to the warm morning air. More blood and that fucked-up black substance poured from his mouth. And hell – that black substance was seriously fucked up. What was it made out of? Engine oil? And how did they get it to pour out like that? Must have a hydraulic pump in his mouth or something.
Carl increased his smile, but couldn’t help feeling unnerved nonetheless.
“Hey man, I understand. You’re staying in character, right? No chatting to the locals while The Walk is on. I totally get it. But I just want you to know that this whole walk is totally freaking - ,”
- but Carl didn’t get chance to say what the walk was totally freaking. It would have probably have been “awesome” or “far out” or “something heavy”, but the words never got chance to be uttered. Because, just at that moment, the zombie lunged forward, its hands hooked into claws, and raked its nails down the bare flesh of Carl’s left arm. Shocked, horrified, and suddenly genuinely frightened, Carl yelled and staggered backward. The zombie also stumbled, and fell onto the pavement, where it lay writhing for a moment. The blood from its recent satiating feast poured from its jaws.
“FUCK!” Carl howled, “ah fuck, fuck, FUCK, man! Too far! Just too fucking FAR!”
He gazed down at his arm. Four large red claw marks had been scored down his forearm. As he watched, the blood welled up from them, deep and red, pouring down his arm and dripping to the tarmac. And this was no special effect, for sure. This was one hundred percent fucked-up reality. And that black stuff... that had got onto his arm as well. Close-to, it looked like tar, or oil: thick and gloopy. It didn’t feel like tar or oil though – or like any harmless substance such as a makeup artist might apply to human skin. Instead it seemed to both burn and freeze at once, almost seeming to paralyse his arm, as though it had been injected with some powerful anaesthetic.
“What have you DONE to me, man?” Carl raged at the zombie on the ground, “what the fuck is this SHIT!”
The zombie, (and he was really beginning to think of it as a zombie now, rather than just a guy in face paint), made no reply, but merely continued to writhe and crawl upon the tarmac like a guy who’s been gutshot.
Gotta get back inside, Carl thought to himself, clean this wound up, wipe this shit off me, maybe even call an ambulance and try to get to a hospital. Christ, this is fucked up... this is so not COOL!
Carl whirled around, hurried a few paces back toward the front door of the apartment block, but stalled. No less than five zombies, (guys in makeup! His mind raged at him, but he was having none of it), had congregated around the front door of the block. A man, a woman, two younger teenagers and a child, (and that was a first, he’d never seen a child on a zombie walk – except this wasn’t a zombie walk, was it?) a nice little family unit, staggering, moaning, howling, and completely cutting off his retreat. Carl thought about trying to force his way through them – but then remembered the other zombie, lunging at him, raking its claws through his flesh, doing this shit for real. No... nope, no way back home right now, maybe not ever the way things were going.
Desperately, Carl turned and fled down the pavement. At last he reached the turning into the alley that ran behind his apartment, and he dived into it. Running, stumbling, scraping elbows and shoulders again the harsh brick, he made his way down the dull, cool, garbage-smelling length of the alley. Passed dustbins that bulged with offal, old newspapers, and fish skeletons, passed cats that hissed and flashed their green eyes, and leaped over brick edges, passed boarded up windows and dark doorways, until at last he slumped, sobbing and trembling, against the side of one cracked-brick wall. A gutter ran down the wall next to him, its length broken and oozing some dark and noxious fluid, while, from above, liquid dropped down upon him. All about was the smell of decay, the miasma of back-alley corruption, while from the distance, the howls of the predator and the screams of the prey reverberated.
Shivering, cold, sickened, Carl held his arm before him. The wounds had stopped bleeding now, and that should have been good news – except that it wasn’t. His wounds had congealed. His wounds had become blackened, while the flesh around the lacerations had become darkened, puffy, as though loaded with poison. Pain beat upward from his arm: strident and horrific, so intense that the limb might have been cut off with a buzz saw. The hand attached to the affected arm had become hooked, clawing, convulsed, the muscles going into spasm. The sensation was one of heat, and then cold, and then heat again, and then heat and cold at once, unified, perfect, the ultimate fever. And a thought sliced through Carl’s mind: clear, cold, sharp, and utterly undeniable:
This is real... not a zombie walk.. not a movie... this is real, and now you are infected...
Carl Baker had always wanted to be a zombie. Zombies were cool. Zombies were happening. Zombies were it. Zombies were rebellion, and metaphor and zeitgeist, and the best movie flick you could ever have with your mates, on Saturday night, with a bucket of popcorn. Zombies were the shit. But now, in this cold, gutter drizzling alley, amongst the garbage cans and the fish skeletons, on this harsh, puddle bedraggled ground, Zombies were actually the furthest thing from Carl Baker’s mind. Because zombies were fun, and thrills and Saturday night escapism, while this... this was infection, this was sickness, this was necrotising flesh and beating pain, and cold, diminishing terror as you gazed down upon your sick and darkening skin...
The infection spread quickly. It was a like those nature shows where they filmed an old stump of wood, and showed the fungus growing there, spreading blooming, opening obscenely to the world. And then they took that film, and speeded it up a million times, and made it look like a quick flourish, a ripe and sudden happening – and that was what this infection was like. Black striations spreading out from the original point of infection, running like spilled ink, joining pale sections of flesh with a ruthless and slicing efficiency, until his whole arm was swollen and deep-blue, as though it had been bitten by a rattlesnake...
...and agony was the world...
....spreading. His shoulder now, his chest, his abdomen, racing down to his stomach, his pubis, his sex withering like old grapes on the vine, then his legs, his feet... and up to his head. His mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes... darkening his vision, making the alley seem remote,
the bricks weirdly structured, the angles skewed and impossible, like seeing alien architecture, like seeing the geometry through an intense drug haze, like seeing a fourth, a fifth, a sixth dimension... and all of it inimical...
...and then down to his heart...
...down to his soul...
...Carl threw back his head and howled into the broken alleyway. His dead voice roared from cracked brick and shattered gutter. Because now the infection had reached his soul, pooling around it like a flu virus around a healthy cell, leeching, finding its entry, and the agony... if the physical pain had been unendurable, then the deep soul-agony that wakened within him was beyond unendurable. It was as though one hundred chasms had been gouged within him, fifty abysses that didn’t even bother to gaze back into you. Language was gone. Understanding was gone. Breathing, heart pulse, respiration, the memory of your first kiss, the taste of sugar, a cough sweet melting on your tongue, the hot plastic smell of a school satchel on a summer day, the sting of a cut knee, the tune of a long forgotten kids TV show while you ate your milk biscuits at four o’clock... all gone now, all lost, echoing down the diminishing well of your soon-to-be-gone humanity...
And replacing all of these common slices of humanity was nothing more than the hunger...
...red. Burning. Glistering. Like the flames in a torture chamber. Like light caught upon the wetness of exposed viscera. Like flushed, infected flesh, like a deep and rotting grotto of burning need...
Need...
Carl had been slumped against the broken brick. Now, slowly, hesitantly, but none the less inexorably, he sat up. His eyes rolled in his head but, useless now because his sight was gone. His limbs reformed: slumped, strange-angled, crooked, as though they remembered, vaguely, what they once had been, but now felt as though they must pose a mockery. His jaw fell open, and from it, black saliva drooled: thick, ropy, glutinous and unnatural. He turned toward the end of the alley, from which he could hear distant screams reverberating. Ten minutes ago, those screams would have frightened him, horrified him - they were real screams, not horror-movie screams - but now they tantalised him, attracted him... and the smell too: warm, hot, living, nothing like himself anymore. Ripe...