“And?” Johnson prompted him.
“And they said that everyone is walking the streets in a daze, attacking everything that moves. Except each other, apparently, but Sarn’t Major, the armoured column,” he paused, his eyes pleading, “they said they were overrun near Southampton…” Mander’s eyes bulged again and he threw himself back toward the bin to finish what he had started.
Johnson turned to Daniels and didn’t need to ask the question. The other Lance Corporal picked up the headset and microphone to call the Naval Air Station back and seek clarification. Johnson listened to the one-sided exchange, wearing a stoically blank look on his weathered face, his eyes stinging and his stomach doing small flips in response to the smell of Mander’s vomit, unable to hear the important parts of the conversation but watching intently as the other man’s face dropped in cold horror at what he was being told.
“Sarn’t Major,” he said weakly, “it’s true. The armour has been overrun and the disease has spread well outside London. They said…” he looked down and swallowed, making Johnson think that they might need another bin in the office before long, “they said that the dead are rising and attacking people.”
“Oh, good Lord,” Palmer said in a higher-pitched voice than normal, “that can’t be right. The Navy boys lost their bottle, eh?” he tried. Johnson ignored him, and instead of responding, he strode back out to the drill hall where a gaggle of sergeants awaited him.
“Change of plan,” he said with savage purpose, “Andy?”
“Behind you,” came a gruff voice belonging to the Squadron Quarter Master Sergeant, Andrew Rochefort. Johnson turned to face him, nodding companionably to the older, shorter man who kept the records of everything they had been or would be issued.
“Every available driver we have takes a vehicle each and we load it with every last supply at this location before we move to the camp. Every bullet, every mortar, every piece of kit, everything down to the last can of bloody beans. Clear?”
They understood him.
“And tell the men to call their families,” he said with next to no hesitation, “tell them the disease has spread out of London, and that they should get themselves somewhere safe.”
He hesitated again, half turning away before he swung back around.
“No,” he said to the small gathering of senior non-commissioned officers, “tell them all to get to the base and bring as much of their own supplies as they can. They can be housed there safely, and we can protect them. Go, now,” he said, seeing them all scurry away to bawl out their units and gather their men to them.
“Are you sure that was the right thing to do, old boy?” Palmer’s greasy voice wafted over his shoulder, making him turn around to speak in a low voice to the young man.
“How long will the unit stay together when their loved ones are out in the trenches whilst we’re safe on camp?” he asked, “How many men will desert to see if their wife or their children or their parents are ok?” Palmer’s face finally registered some understanding.
“And,” Johnson added icily, “I’m not your old boy.”
Chapter 9
Peter’s experience in the shop was instantly marked as different from the previous times he had been there. There was no music playing. There were no fluorescent lights showing inside their opaque plastic cases which the flies managed to somehow access but never escape. His mother had already scurried her way into the store without pausing to notice anything was wrong with the scene, but her young son was less driven by the need to collect more alcohol and cigarettes than she was.
He watched as she shrieked again in her grating voice, trying to get the attention of the shopkeeper, in vain as nobody appeared to be there. It took her only a few precious seconds to assimilate the facts and weigh up the benefits versus the risks before she began stealing.
Peter heard the noises of bottles clinking together and the almost furious mutterings of an addict not getting their own way easily. His feelings of unease were heightened to almost snapping point when her shrill voice called his name and made him jump clear off the ground. His feet moving without conscious decision, he reported for duty and rounded an aisle to see her with her arms full of bottles and packets and her eyes wide in expectation at him.
“Well?” she snarled, somehow conveying that she was disappointed by his stupidity yet again, “Get a bloody bag or something.”
Peter fled, running to the small counter with its barred window that overlooked the forecourt and the single fuel pump standing forlornly, as though the process of someone needing petrol would resurrect it once more to life. Reaching over behind the counter, his hand touched the cool softness of the slab of plastic carrier bags ready to be peeled away by the cashier when needed. Fumbling the first few attempts, Peter licked his thumb and tried again, rewarded instantly with two bags which he struggled to open as he returned to his mother. She told him to hold the bags open, placing one inside the other as she reverently placed the precious bottles inside with more care than she showed to her own offspring. When the bag was full enough to complement the other bottles taken from the pub, but not so full that the greed of an extra litre jeopardised the safety of the first bottles, she abandoned the hunt for alcohol and turned her attention to the cabinet behind the cash desk.
Heading straight for her preferred brand, easily discerned amongst the wall of colour as one of the only packets which were predominantly black, she helped herself to every single packet on display, before hesitating and doing the same with another brand; obviously her second choice. Peter, eager to help and anxious that not helping would attract unwanted attention, licked his thumb again and opened more bags for her to use.
Seeing her greedily making relays to the car as she momentarily left him inside on his own, Peter did the first immoral thing he had ever consciously, willingly done.
On the second time she left him alone for those few precious seconds of solitude, his eyes rested on the shiny, brown packaging of a Marathon bar. His gaze darted up to her receding back as she approached their car, then back to the chocolate.
It called to him. Nestled between the dark blue of the packaging on the Wispa bars and the red, white and blue of the longer but very chewy Curly Wurly bars on the other side. With almost no hesitation, he reached out and closed his fingers around the first Marathon and picked it up. Just as the bell on the front door erupted into horribly loud life to signal the return of his mother.
She looked at him, unaware of what he was doing but utterly convinced that he was up to no good given the look on his face, and she drew back a hand in preparation to slap him around the face. Noticing the chocolate in his hands just before she began the return swing towards him she stopped, relaxed her shoulders, and dropped her hand without warning.
“You could’ve just said,” she admonished him, not for stealing but for looking guilty about it. “Take what you want,” and with that, she returned to her relay of ferrying stolen alcohol and cigarettes back to their car.
Peter didn’t move.
He still couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t being tricked, but he reminded himself that everything to have happened in the last week had been more than a little abnormal.
Taking her permission literally, he licked his thumb again and began to fill a few of the thin blue plastic carrier bags with all the things he had never had the courage to ask for. He took pot noodles after seeing the television advertisement for them. He took Cadbury’s chocolate, Marathon and Mars bars. He took Caramacs, Star Bars, Toffos, an entire box of Opal Fruits, Yorkies, Sherbert Dips, and filled the three bags entirely from just the shelves below the counter. He took more bags and stuffed them with Monster Munch crisps, Nik Naks, Frazzles, Space Invaders and Chipsticks until those bags were full too. Putting his lighter haul with his earlier heavy one, he turned to get yet more bags and froze as he heard a noise he dreaded.
Outside, the engine of their car was starting.
He threw himself to the door, stopping j
ust in time to snatch his bags up, and dropping one full of chocolate and sweets but not daring to risk the time it would take to retrieve them. Flying from the shop in desperation he arrived at the car in time to see his mother with a lit cigarette in her right hand as she replaced the cap on a bottle with her left.
The cruel smirk of evil she wore on seeing his panic and distress reminded him harshly of the cards he had been dealt in his short life, and he went to climb into the passenger side before his eyes rested on the seat covered in the bags he had helped her fill.
Quickly deciding that she would deem the contents of those bags to be far more important to her than he was, he shuffled sideways and climbed in the back seat. Keeping a wary eye on her as she drove back to the farm, he ate a Marathon in slow silence, relishing every bite of the salty caramel and peanuts inside.
~
Arriving back at the abandoned farm shortly afterwards and having seen no sign of life on the journey back, Peter spilled from the car to loiter out of range of his mother, who had already begun to metamorphose into her old self as the booze coursed its way into her bloodstream. She had become morose and aggressive once more. No doubt now she was able to focus on anything other than her need to get more alcohol and stop her hands from shaking uncontrollably, she recalled the facts.
Those facts, put simply as they were in Peter’s mind, were that something terrible had happened in London, his sister and Father had gone and not returned, people were acting weird and had abandoned their farm and, worst of all for him, he was now trapped in their idyllic corner of rural nowhere with his mother, who had descended into an almost catatonic state of self-pity. Almost catatonic, that was, as she still managed to automatically refill her glass with neat alcohol, and chain smoke as she stared holes through the blank screen of the television.
Peter, through seeking solitude and safety from her, took his stolen haul and slipped out of the back door. The dog followed him, not out of any affection or loyalty, but because he was going out via the back door and that was the way to the farm. It was a clever dog, as almost all collies were, especially when they worked on farms, but she displayed no fondness for the young boy and made it clear that her place in life was above his own. Now, for the lack of anything better to do and the subtle promise of food from the rustling bags, it followed him into the chill afternoon.
No sooner had they left via the rear of the house and slipped through the barrier of evergreen trees that stood as the demarcation line between residence and farm, than three shambling figures made their way slowly up the lane from the side least often used.
They had been in a field of waist-high maize, stumbling aimlessly around and attracted by the noise that each other was making. When they moved closer to investigate those noises, no smells inspired their hunger or forced their aggressive natures to surface, so they bumped along almost sightlessly in a trio, looking socially awkward and only friends by default as no others would give them the time of day.
New sounds other than those they made amongst themselves pricked the edges of their automated senses, and made their faces turn as one to the road.
Their feet answered the unconscious call to move towards the sounds and, as one, they shuffled towards the twin barriers of a light hedge and a shallow drainage ditch. That was all that separated them from the rough, neglected tarmac with a strip of insistent grass growing straight up through the middle. One, dressed in the pale blue shirt of a convenience shop franchise, which betrayed the reason for the shop being empty, was the first to fall through the hedge and pitch cumbersomely into the ditch. It did not reach out like a normal person would; there was no instinctive flinch reaction to break its own fall and protect the brain, as humans had evolved to do. Instead, it was merely reaching out ahead of it, as they did to compensate for their reduced visual acuity. That outstretched arm made direct contact in a downward motion, stiffly absorbing the full force of the fall, and a loud crack echoed along the lane and was contained by the tunnel of greenery which enclosed the overgrown passage. The shoulder of that arm disfigured horribly, the lower arm shortened in an instant and a bright shaft of splintered white bone appeared through his mottled, olive skin just before the elbow.
Showing no reaction to the open fracture of his right arm, nor the broken collar bone which grated the two ends together noisily, or the dislocated shoulder, the man in the pale blue uniform shirt clambered awkwardly back to his feet to lead the other two, who were more fortunate.
Shambling as a trio, as a small pack of hungry yet uncoordinated predators, they made their halting, jerky way along the narrow lane in search of the thing that had driven past and made the big noise.
The other two, a younger woman with the same skin tone as the leading one, and an older man of far greater girth, stepped dutifully along in flanking positions as the three made their slow progress onwards. They knew no passing of time, felt no pain and experienced no conscious thoughts about their actions, they just moved resolutely and implacably onwards.
Looking on, it appeared as if someone had managed to coordinate the actions of drunks and herd them all towards a specific point, and all with the same intent. The thing that herded them was the draw of sound, and the intent that their sub-conscious, base-instinct-level brains associated with sound was food.
But food was a by-product. A construct of the disease which inhabited their bodies and took over control for its own ends. A virus has one simple goal in its existence, one mindless, relentless objective which consumes everything: the task of spreading itself.
The virus made the people it had infected associate sound and movement with healthy people.
When close enough, that healthy flesh was pungent in their nostrils and whipped them into a frenzy, when their actions became more intense and their need for food made them desperate, and with that desperation came a sudden and brutal speed and strength that made them display the obvious signs of the disease on which it was originally based. They foamed at the mouth as the over-active salivation glands made their mouths drool and their gnashing, chomping teeth, moving incessantly in anticipation and expectation of human flesh, frothed that spittle into a foam.
But that hunger was a ruse. It was a feint. A fake, a lie, a fiction, a falsehood, a trick; a fabricated deception designed for one purpose, and one purpose alone.
To infect as many more viable hosts as possible.
Chapter 10
Peter pumped his legs to move himself fast over the low, rolling landscape behind the prison of his home. He had paused only long enough to snatch up one of his most valued possessions: a battered camouflage backpack with an army surplus water bottle attached. He filled the bottle from an outside tap, stuffed his stolen haul into the bag and paced quickly away from what he felt was the most dangerous place he could be in.
He’d seen her like this before, when his father was away for something he was too unimportant to be told about, and his sister had called it a meltdown.
Meltdown, he thought, that’s about right for her.
His only priority was to get himself away from the risk posed by her imminent detonation as soon as the alcohol took over, or the cigarettes ran out, or even something small such as a stubbed toe or a spilt drink set her off. When she flipped, she had no way to regain control of herself. He had learned that to his detriment years before, and as a result had learned to make himself small and invisible whenever he was around her. He decided that, after the look in her eye when she silently threatened to drive away and leave him behind, being around her any longer that day would not end well.
She showed a distinct inclination towards cruelty when she was upset, and she was clearly upset.
Peter had no desire to listen to her ranting become louder and less intelligible before she demanded that he come to her, and stand close enough to be shouted at, and hit whenever she felt like making a point.
He couldn’t articulate all of this himself, not easily, but he had the instinct of a survivor to escape pot
ential trouble when he sensed it coming.
It was a different kind of trouble coming, but he had no way of even beginning to understand that just yet.
Instead of watching his mother drink herself into angry oblivion, he walked fast towards the nearest woodland bordering the farm and wove his way between the trees until the early afternoon light was obscured by the heavy foliage. Selecting a fallen log as a seat, he slipped one arm out of the strap of his backpack and swung it around to the front of his body. Selecting himself a packet of crisps he hadn’t had before, ones that promised tangy tomato goodness, he settled down to enjoy them one by one.
He was watched intently by the dog, Meg, and her intelligent black and white face fixed on his as he chewed slowly. He had never made a connection with the dog, mostly because the dog had never wanted his attention or affections, as it simply wanted to spend its life on the farm doing what it had always done. Perhaps intelligence or instinct told the dog that things had changed and were never going to return to normal, so she had decided to pay him some attention.
Either that, or the dog was following that universal calling of a rustling packet.
Peter threw the dog one of the ball-shaped corn snacks dusted in the tasty red powder that made his tongue tingle. The dog caught it effortlessly and chewed twice before rejecting his offering by opening her mouth wide towards the leaf-covered ground and making a retching, coughing noise to spit it out. Looking up at him again, her eyes seemed to request an alternative, or at the very least a second opinion on the packet he was close to finishing.
He said nothing, instead ripping open the packet to lay it flat and allow the dog to inspect the residue in its own time. Reaching out a hand to stroke the dog’s head, he recoiled instantly as it snapped its hard mouth at his fingers in disgust at his attempt to show affection. She made it clear that she had no interest in his attentions.
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