After the Fall (Book 8): Faith of the Dead

by Stephen Cross

  Faith of the Dead

  After the Fall 8

  by Stephen Cross

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Cross

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  By the same author, find out how the apocalypse began in

  SURVIVING THE FALL

  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KBPYRFM

  How England died. The story of the first few days of the zombie apocalypse, of those who lived, and those who died.

  Surviving the Fall collects eight non-stop terror tales in one action packed volume, which together tell of the panic filled dawn of a new, undead world.

  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01KBPYRFM

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 1

  Grace stared into the fire, the yellow and orange flames licking the sides of the deep fireplace delicately, as if scared to scar the brick. She held up her cold fingers to the weak flames.

  Crackling of the wood, otherwise silence.

  It was her watch. She shouldn’t have been staring at the fire, she should have been crouched by the front window of the attic, watching the street below, then shifting to the window at the other side of the room to watch the gardens.

  But the room was cold. The old carpets and withering wallpaper sucked in the heat from the fire. Her fingers were numb. What use would she be if her fingers were numb and she couldn’t grip her baseball bat?

  It was no good, guilt got the better of her. She pulled on her gloves and moved quietly to the window that looked over the street. The floorboards of the old terrace house creaked like a bear stirring from sleep. Turn over again. Back to hibernation.

  She hoped she hadn’t woke Harry in the bedroom below. His shift had ended at two o’clock, he had been tired. Her shift would end when he got up, around seven, usually. Rising came with the light, these days. Since the Fall three months ago, and the sudden death of the electrical world man had spent thousands of years creating, Grace found her sleeping patterns had reverted to that of wild animals; up with the sun, down with the sun. Like an old switch had awoken inside her,this is how we used to live, how we are meant to live.

  Up with the sun, down with the sun.

  What would happen come the depths of winter? It was sometime in September now, by her reckoning. A few more months and the darkness would envelop England, its hungry claw releasing the sun for only a few hours each day. Would her and Harry be forced to sleep for hours, their awakening only enough time to forage and feed?

  Maybe they could hibernate, like old bears.

  Grace gently opened the velux window of the attic room. A blast of cold air brushed past her face, an icy contrast to the glow from the fire.

  She glanced with longing at the fire. Of course, keeping warm, like all things in this world, came at a price. The fire advertised their position via a column of smoke every night. It wasn’t the infected that worried her; the infected didn’t care for columns of smoke; it was the thoughts of wandering tribes of desperate survivors, clad in leathers with their rough hewn weapons and rusty blades, that she protected her thoughts against.

  She hadn’t seen any of these tribes except in her darkest dreams, but they must exist, mustn’t they? Every film that dealt with the apocalypse had them. Their rough Captains dressed like bikers, huge beards revealing nothing but their eyes, as black as the night… But maybe the terrible tribes didn’t wander the lonely tenement suburbs of Bristol. Much too pedestrian for their ravaging desires.

  The moon was high, the thin street below illuminated in soft glowing blue light, showing all the deserted cars, all the blowing rubbish in the wind, all the smashed windows on the blank rows of terraced houses.

  All the rotting carcasses.

  Every street had a carcass of some sort. If you were lucky it was a real cadaver, a body that had found real death. The type that didn’t claw, hiss, and moan from the bottom of hell.

  Death, everywhere, in this new England.

  A shudder of movement from the end of the street.

  Grace took a sharp intake of breath, then clasped her hand over her mouth. Sound travelled in the still of the night. They followed sound, it was one of their most developed senses. She knew this, not just anecdotally, but through her past job as a virologist, where she had researched all the government’s dirty little viral secrets.. As the Fall raged above her underground lab, the army had brought them asample.She had spent the last days of civilisation cutting it open. She had observed the dying frontal cortex turning black under the march of the virus. She had seen the growing tendrils reaching deep into the reptilian brain, the virus feeding connections between the senses, seeing all, hearing all.

  So she knew they could hear better than her, see better than her.

  And feel nothing.

  Altogether an improvement.

  There was three of them on the street. The shambles, she called them sometimes. That’s what they were, a shambles of existence. Decrepit and rotting, necrotic shells insulting the beings they used to be.

  They didn’t walk, they shambled. Was that even a verb, thought Grace? It was now. There was no English Oxford Dictionary commission to tell her she was wrong. She could make up as many verbs as she liked.

  The sound of their feet scraping the tarmac of the road echoed through the close rows of houses. She watched, entranced, like a mouse watching a precession of cats from safe in its hole.

  One stopped, the one in the middle with the awkwardly balanced head. Something white protruded from its neck - a shoulder bone maybe? It raised its head and sniffed.

  Grace held her breath.

  Its head moved slowly from left to right, scanning the street. The others stopped, aware, somehow, that their colleague had paused.

  Too stupid though, to look up.

  Nothing in front of it, nothing to the left or right. It didn’t look behind.

  Maybe not such an improvement after all.

  It walked again. Shambled.

  All three of them, on the move.

  Grace realised her heart had been thumping.

  Once they left the street, turning a corner that led further into the maze of old terraced houses, Grace pulled the window closed.

  Chapter 2

  Harry woke slowly. He slept deeply now, the constant anxiety that had filled his world after the collapse morphing into acceptance. The Fall was becoming a dark mist over his memory, his previous life nothing but a gossamer thin dream.

  He squinted at his watch with its glow-in-the-dark hands. The room remained in shadow even though the sun had risen. Heavy green curtains that stank of mothballs denied most of the light, but still the sun managed to sneak in through gaps by the walls.

  It was past seven thirty.

  Or was it? There was no internet or TV or radio to set his watch against, only the sun. He didn’t know how to set the time by the sun. He was a virologist, not a fucking weatherman.

  He lay still, staring at the ceiling. A rotten orange colour. Nothing in the house had been decorated since the seventies, he guessed. H
e didn’t want to get up, but if he spent too long alone with his thoughts, the fear would get him; a dark blanket on his mind, driving him into a panic. The first week into the Fall, Grace had found him by a tree next to the car they had been sleeping in. Curled up, crying, trying to pull his hair out.

  He wished Grace hadn’t found him like that. He felt embarrassed. He wanted to be stronger.

  He got out of bed and pulled on his clothes. He supposed they stank, but he was used to the smell.

  He walked to the hall, the floor boards creaking under foot.

  “Hey Grace,” he called up the stairs to the attic. “Everything ok?”

  A pause. “Morning. You’re early?”

  He climbed the stairs. She was sitting by the back window, staring through the glass.

  “You see something?” said Harry.

  “Come look,” she said.

  He joined her. Four zombies in the garden of the property that backed onto their house (was it really their house?) They wandered aimlessly, milling like rogue remote control cars tuned into the frequency of everything; no direction, no aim.

  “That’s new,” he said.

  “They arrived a few hours ago.”

  The fence between the two properties was old and rickety, and in a state of disrepair. Heavy vegetation climbed and pushed against the grey-white planks.

  “Guess we keep an eye on them,” said Harry.

  “We could take care of them now, before they attract any others,” she said.

  Harry preferred not to confront them. Grace liked to kill them.

  “If you think so,” he said. “Let’s have a cup of tea first,” he said.

  The kitchen. Linoleum wallpaper similar to that which Harry’s grandmother used to have; dirty brown and shiny pictures of unknown vegetables sitting by pots, repeating in little squares across the wall. Greasy stains above the rusting gas cooker. Bright yellow linoleum curtains.

  Harry pulled open one of the cupboards, took out the tea and the sugar, and passed them to Grace, who was lighting their little camping stove.

  “We’re going to have to go on that run,” he said. The cupboard was nearly empty. Just a few tins of chopped tomatoes, tuna, and baked beans. Maybe enough for a day or two. Always best to go when you weren’t desperate.

  “I’ll go,” said Grace, staring out into the garden.

  “You went last time,” said Harry.

  “It’s ok, I can go again. You don’t like them.”

  “It’s my turn,” he said trying to inject his words with an air of finality. It may have worked, she didn’t say anything else.

  After the last run, she had come back covered in blood. Her face, her arms, her clothes. He asked her how many she had killed and she hadn’t answered, but went upstairs. He hadn’t seen her for three hours.

  He watched as she put the tea bags into the cups. He wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, to hug her, for he knew that she never stopped thinking about what she had done on the day the Fall had reached their secret government lab. The man, the government man, Taylor, had deserved to die.

  But Grace couldn’t see that.

  Instead she locked everything inside, punishing herself, punishingthem,the infected.

  He wished she would stop.

  How many zombies would be enough?

  The kettle whistled. Grace rushed to pull out the stopper. She turned and gave Harry a rare smile. “Maybe you can get a kettle that doesn’t whistle this time?”

  He smiled back, “Consider it done.”

  Chapter 3

  The cramped terrace streets made Harry nervous. Red brick and dirty tired houses looked down upon him with dark windows like a thousand watching eyes. How many people hid in the empty rooms and watched him pass? How many thought about stealing his goods, taking his weapons, or killing him just for the hell of it?

  He had seen them. Curtains twitching, figures disappearing in a flash as he looked up. He knew the houses hid people and secrets behind their nailed shut doors.

  The infected too. Bouncing around the walls of their old homes, trapped, gnashing at the windows as he walked passed.

  His steps crunched on the street. It was a gentle clear day, the type he had missed in his old life in his underground lab, exploring and manipulating the worst viruses man and nature had deigned to forge. Grace suggested their lab may have had something to do with this virus. She carried round her laptop like a child with its favourite teddy bear, saying she had evidence on there, but with no power, how could she show him? He wondered if she was going mad.

  He turned at the end of a t-junction, and saw his usual route to the shopping precinct cut off by two cars on fire. Zombies loitered around the burning metal carcass, black smoke flailing into the sky like escaping laundry. They loved fire like they loved loud noises. Their base senses dragged them to the large; big noises, big sounds, big colours.

  The air shimmered with the heat, giving the undead an ethereal presence.

  He didn’t think about how the fire started, or who started it, or where the cars had came from. It didn’t do to think about things like that. Everything was as it was, simple as that. Any further thoughts would tend to drive you mad.

  He would have to go round.

  Harry turned and walked the two hundred feet to the next junction. It would take him to the park, and then he could back track to the shopping centre that way.

  As Harry turned the corner, he paused.

  A mass of figures congregated in the park. Black figures, bumbling, shuffling. Funny how even those who had worn bright clothes at the time of their turning had managed to become dark and grey; their colour, along with their souls, sucked dry.

  There was too many to count. A playground to the left, its bright and lonely climbing frame and swings sprouting above the crowd of zombies.

  The worst kid’s party Harry had ever seen.

  A sudden moan, louder than the background hum, cut into the almost still air. Quickly followed by another, then another. A terrible chorus of the damned.

  He had stared for too long. They were like that; it was hard not to stare, to become transfixed by their awfulness, their hopelessness. There was always the danger of getting caught up in them, not realising until it was almost too late.

  Like now.

  They began to move as one, their shuffling coming together like a macabre dance. Their heads turning in unison towards Harry. Their drawling gaits directed towards him.

  “Shit,” he whispered under his breath.

  It was a bad job, Grace would have to wait for her kettle. Or maybe she could go and get it herself; he’d had enough today.

  He turned and broke into a run, back towards the house.

  He reached to the junction that led to their street, and with no sign of the dead following him, he was safe to go home

  He stopped. Something caught his eye.

  The other zombies, the ones by the flaming cars, were walking towards him, moaning and clicking. Did they communicate like this? Had the horde behind called to this group;here, he is here, this way.

  Harry darted down his road, towards their house that sat in the middle of the tenement row. He ran fast, glancing behind him.

  They appeared as he arrived at the house. The fire gang. Pulling their legs along awkwardly. Groaning, hissing, calling to the others.

  He fumbled with the keys and opened the door. Maybe they wouldn’t see which house he was going into. Maybe they would just move on.

  One last glance. The park gang were there too now.

  He pushed the door open and shut it behind him. He locked it.

  “Grace,” he whisper shouted.

  No response. The dark hallway, with the old woman’s coat still hanging next to the door, remained silent.

  “Grace,” he said, allowing his voice to rise.

  Nothing.

  She must be upstairs.

  He put his foot on the first stair, then stopped.

  A cry from beyond the kitchen. Sh
rill, triumphant, even.

  He raised his baseball bat and stepped quietly towards the noise.

  The front door closed as Harry left on his run. Grace stood in the small kitchen, sipping on her tea, standing by the window. The garden was developing a gentle covering of leaves as the few small and spindly birch trees began to undress for winter. The back fence was visible above some overgrown bushes.

  Four zombies were in the garden beyond.

  As if waking from a dream she glanced behind her at the front door, finally recognising its closing. Harry was out on a run. He may not come back. She should have kissed him, just on the cheek, and maybe squeezed his shoulder and told him good luck. Smiled at him, let him know that she cared and that she wanted him to come back alive; not dripping in blood, his innards hanging from his stomach like a wet sack of meat.

  He had said,I’m going. Grace had nodded her head, but continued staring into the garden, thinking of the zombies beyond the fence.

  Why did she do that? Why did she shut him out?

  She put down her tea and walked into the lounge. The curtains were closed, like they always were, and the room was cast in a dim grey orange light.

  Her laptop sat on the table. It contained files her old professor had saved that spoke of global conspiracy, that hinted at the nature of this virus; that it had been cooked up in a lab by men and women in white coats, like her and Harry.

  It made her think of Taylor. The government spook, the silent man in the grey suit that hovered throughout the labs, silently directing the wishes of whatever organisation he reported to.

  Taylor, who Grace shot in the face.

  In anger, in cold blood.

  Taylor, who made Grace a killer. Grace. Miss Grace. DisGrace. Fall from Grace.

  She picked up the sledgehammer that lay against the couch.

  Walking quickly, no time for any more thought, she left the lounge, the kitchen, into the back garden.

  Low moans floated in the air. The occasional hissing. No clicking though, they saved that for when they were really excited.