by Mark Clapham
I nodded, but I didn’t know, and I didn’t really want to. I wished I’d never asked, to be honest.
There were lights ahead.
‘Is that the road?’ I asked.
Melissa shook her head. Her friendly demeanour seemed to slip a little as she stared straight ahead. She was back to being all business.
‘No, but let’s avoid them,’ she said. ‘If we move a little downhill, they should pass by without seeing us.’
‘Okay,’ I said, following her direction and rounding slowly to the left, down an incline. As the lights moved towards us, they stuck to higher ground, and Melissa indicated I should duck behind a fallen tree. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it when I nearly walked into the damn thing. We crouched behind it, the old mossy bark cold against my palms as I held myself steady. The leafy ground was wet beneath my feet, moisture seeping slowly into my trainers, and I really didn’t want to sit in it.
‘Sshhh,’ said Melissa, even though I hadn’t spoken.
As they drifted past, I was glad Melissa had navigated me out of the way.
The lights I had seen were ghosts, wearing lab coats or plastic bunny suits. As opposed to Melissa’s composure, these ghosts were acting in the way I was more familiar with, and peeking over the top of the fallen tree I saw sadly common tics. The dead scientists—or lab techs, or whatever they were—mumbled to themselves, stared in all directions, stumbled on without ever even acknowledging each other.
The traumatised dead, unable to come to terms with their predicament. If Melissa was right, then these ghosts would never move on, because they would never be cognisant enough to understand what had happened to them, never mind accept it.
Life was unfair. So was death, apparently.
‘How are you not like that?’ I whispered to Melissa as the ghosts moved out of earshot—presuming they didn’t have ghost super-hearing as well as colourless undead supersight.
‘I have an aptitude for rapidly responding to complex and challenging situations,’ she replied.
I paused to digest this elaborate non-answer to my question.
‘Is that from your CV?’ I asked as we started moving again.
‘Yes,’ Melissa replied, walking ahead so that I was staring at her back, unable to read her expression. All I could see was the swirling, translucent ectoplasm on the back of her suit jacket. I couldn’t begin to imagine what she was dealing with.
For the first time in a life of dealing with ghosts, I was feeling sorry for one. I tried to bring the conversation back on track, to something normal.
‘What exactly did you do?’ I asked, wincing slightly at my own use of the past tense. ‘You’re not dressed for the lab.’
‘I was an accountant,’ she replied, glancing back at me, almost guiltily.
‘You were an accountant. For a secret evil research facility?’
She laughed at that, a short involuntary bark.
‘Any large operation like this needs finance people,’ she said. ‘And if I had known what they were up to I would have—mind that branch—I wouldn’t have agreed to the job.’
I stepped over the branch.
‘What the hell did you think they were doing out here, in the middle of nowhere?’ I asked. I wasn’t trying to interrogate her, I was just curious.
‘Research on animals. I was told the security and isolation was to keep out animal rights activists, and it’s not like I particularly wanted to see what they were up to down there. Maybe I should have asked more questions.’
I mumbled something about it being an understandable position.
There were lights ahead again, but this time they weren’t ghosts, unless these were ghosts on stilts: the lights were high up, regularly spaced, and shone down into the forest. Looking down, I could dimly see my own feet again, and pick my way through the rest of the forest without guidance.
I told Melissa.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘We’re getting towards the road. I’ll go ahead and find a safe point to cross.’
She jogged off through the woods ahead, moving straight through any obstacles, eventually disappearing behind the trees.
I kept walking. The light was getting stronger as I approached the road, and I could clearly see the lampposts. I felt much safer being able to see where I was going, at least in terms of breaking my neck.
At the same time, I felt decidedly exposed on my own. What if we were wrong about the zombies sticking to well-lit areas? My feet in the undergrowth sounded appallingly loud, as did my breath.
If these things had particularly good hearing, I was fucked.
As I got to ten or twenty feet from the road, I spotted Melissa off to my left, beckoning me towards a darker patch between two pools of light. I stumbled in her direction, trying not to make more noise than I needed to.
I reached her position, which was a few feet away from what I could now see was an unmarked road curving through the woods, and she waved at me to get down and watch. The point in the road we were nearest to was between two of the tall street lights. It wasn’t dark out there on this stretch of road, but it wasn’t as brightly lit as it would be right under those lights.
I was about to say something when Melissa raised a finger to her lips.
I watched, and listened.
I mainly heard my own breathing, the rustling of trees in a light wind, the dripping of rain falling from leaves. My sounds, the sounds of the woods.
Then I heard something else, also breathy, also wet. A damp, deep moaning sound. It was like breathing, but not, a hollow wheeze that creaked like old bones, wet with the guttural stutter of consumptive lungs.
I tried to breathe quieter.
Its footsteps were barely audible as I saw it approach, its feet shuffling in low, slow movements, barely rising off the ground, scraping the soft tarmac surface of the road.
In the dim light between the streetlights, I couldn’t make out too many details, which I was glad of, but I could make out a twisted human figure making the same jerky, stumbling movements I had seen from the zombies near the diner. I watched as it walked, painfully slowly, past our position. Once, it stopped, turning left and right, and I held my breath properly then, knowing that if I did so for too long, the release when I breathed again would be dangerously loud.
Swinging its head back and forth, the zombie eventually stared at the light ahead, and shuffled off once more.
‘Wait here,’ whispered Melissa, darting into the road.
She stood there, looking incredibly exposed in the middle of the road, and looked both ways.
‘Now,’ she said, and I tried to get up and run as fast as I could, but ended up stumbling as my limbs creaked out of the crouch I had been locked in for a few minutes.
Melissa gave me a death stare, understandably exasperated that I seemed in worse shape than the actual dead. I dashed across the road, and glanced both ways as I did so.
Up the road, I could see the zombie making its way around the curve. Below, presumably towards the lab complex itself, I caught a glimpse of what looked like a cluster of figures.
Then they were out of sight as I left the road and waded into tall, wet grass.
I hunched a little as I pushed my way through the grass, which came up to my chest. In the open field, the light from the road carried much further, and I didn’t want to be spotted by anything dragging itself up that way.
Wading through the grass was much easier than crossing the forest, at least in the sense that I could see where I was going. Less pleasantly, I couldn’t see anything coming either.
I wondered whether Melissa could see what was going on around her more than I could.
‘David?’ I heard her call out. ‘Where are you?’
I guess not.
I risked sticking my head up, and spotted her a short distance away. I preferred not to shout and draw attention to myself. Thankfully she spotted me, and I waved her over.
I then ducked beneath the grassline and waited for her to catch up with me.
> ‘You look a mess,’ she said, standing with grass stalks sticking right through her body.
‘Thanks,’ I said. While I was a dripping wet mess from wading through the grass, she looked as perfectly pressed as ever. Apart from the whole grass-piercing-her-body thing. ‘Where am I supposed to be going?’
‘This way,’ she said, moving in roughly the direction I was walking anyway. ‘We’ll be there soon.’
I FOUND THAT reassuring, even though I didn’t know exactly where we were going yet.
I hope that those of you who are easily bored will be reassured too, knowing that we were going to get somewhere and my whole story isn’t just a succession of difficult flora I had to walk across.
We were getting somewhere, alright, although initially I wasn’t that impressed.
‘IS THIS IT?’ I said.
We had emerged from the long grass into an open area with a few rusted motor homes, a collapsing toilet block, a few stray taps sticking out of the ground and other amenities.
I thought of trying one of the taps, but it looked rusted up and I didn’t want to get tetanus on top of everything else.
‘It’s a place on our route,’ said Melissa. ‘I thought you might need a breather. Or there might be something useful here.’
‘Well, I’m picking up a distinct sense of being creeped out,’ I said, nudging a deflated, withered American football with my toe. While there didn’t seem to be any actual ghosts there, a derelict campsite in the dead of night was not a comforting place to be, with the wind whistling through the collapsing motor homes and a playground swing creaking at the edge of the site.
But... the sky was clear, and I had line of sight in all directions if I sat on a picnic table in the most open part of the site. So now was as good a time as any to catch my breath, and get a couple of answers before I went anywhere near this lab.
‘What is this place, anyway?’ I asked. ‘Apart from a campsite. I got that bit.’
‘I gather there used to be a lot of different things out here, before the company came,’ Melissa said. ‘No large population—that would have been too hard to deal with—but a shop, an unpopular camping area, a couple of farms. The company bought the surrounding land when they took over, paid off those who were willing to go quietly and had the rest of the tenants evicted.’
‘But they let diner guy stay?’ I asked. Poor sod, look how that worked out for him.
‘Diner guy was on the payroll,’ she said. ‘A lookout. Guess no-one bothered to alert him when things went south.’
Poor sod, I thought again.
I gave the picnic table a good kick to check it was stable, then sat down. It was cold and wet, but after my walk through the long grass dry clothes were no longer an option. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as the matter I needed to discuss, anyway.
‘Do you know where your body is?’ I asked Melissa. ‘Or do we have to search?’
She looked at me askance for a second, as if she was offended by the topic. Another glimpse of her unguarded self.
‘I locked myself in a cupboard in a basement level of the main admin building,’ she said. ‘Gregson... that is, my boss... bit me, but I managed to get away and barricade myself in. I thought I would be safe. I’d seen those things but I didn’t know it was the bite that spread the infection.’
She wasn’t looking at me as she talked. She’d said everything I needed to know, but kept on talking.
‘It took me a while to realise,’ she said. ‘But then I began to feel it happening. The numbness. The hunger. I could feel myself sinking, losing my grip.’
‘Like falling asleep?’
‘Like being drowned,’ Melissa snapped back, looking straight at me with a level of rage and pain I could barely relate to. I’d spent my entire adult life avoiding trouble, and here was someone who looked like she wanted to kick the sun off its axis for what had happened to her.
I flinched.
Sue me, Americans, I’m English. Aside from my other copious personal issues, I’m not bred to deal with that kind of raw emotion.
‘I’ll see if I can find something useful,’ I said, ending the conversation about as artlessly as possible.
I didn’t think there were any zombies crawling under the broken-down motor homes, but I was careful nonetheless. I still wished I had a torch, but unsurprisingly anything that useful had already been taken. Most of what had been left was the kind of junk families buy on holiday and can’t be bothered to take back with them—footballs, tennis rackets, soaking half-empty bags of BBQ charcoal.
No hunting knives, medical kits, torches or ammunition. Videogames had lied to me all these years.
Eventually I did find something vaguely useful. A hockey stick; made of graphite, judging by its condition. Tough to recycle, and never going to compost even when left on the wet ground for years.
It wasn’t the traditional baseball bat the videogames promised, but near enough. It would have a bit of a swing and make an impact. I’d played hockey once at school and nearly taken someone’s kneecap off—by accident—so I hoped I could get a zombie to at least back off a bit.
‘Will this do?’ I asked Melissa, as if she were the expert. Compared to me, I guess she was.
‘For now,’ Melissa said. ‘We might find something more useful in the cabin, but I didn’t want to take you in there unprepared.’
‘A cabin in the woods?’ I asked. I didn’t like the thought of that
‘A cabin in a semi-wooded area near to an old farm,’ Melissa replied. ‘Not as creepy as it sounds. Poachers use it, company security has wired it and keeps tabs on them. I guess it passes the time. If we’re going to find anything useful, it’ll be there.’
That didn’t sound too bad.
CHAPTER FOUR
I DON’T WANT to belabour the cross-cultural thing, because I don’t want this account to turn into a zombie version of all those heart-warmingly amusing Bill Bryson-type books about the differences between Britain and America, but most British people never have any reason to deal with guns, to the point where they’re effectively fictional, fantasy items that only exist in films, like lightsabers and stain-free sex.
I have had more experience than most, in that I fired a shotgun at a clay pigeon once while visiting a friend who lived in the country. The clay pigeon was fine, but the kick really bruised my shoulder. I don’t think that counts as firearms training.
So I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d do with a gun if I got one, but if one was available I definitely wanted it, even if I only used it as a last resort, at the point-blank range necessary for me to actually hit something.
I FOUND A shotgun in the poacher’s den. I was hoping it would be in a rack, or leaned against a wall like in some rustic painting of a farmer’s kitchen. Maybe sensibly locked up in a proper gun cabinet I would need to lever open with my slim but sturdy hockey stick, though I couldn’t see poachers bothering with sensible safety precautions.
Instead I found the shotgun in a poacher’s hands, pointed at my face.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ demanded the poacher.
It was a fair fucking question.
THE CABIN WAS more or less exactly as Melissa had described it, a small wooden hut at the edge of a deserted farm, closer to the lab complex than the campsite. According to Melissa, the faint light I could see over the next hill was the lab itself.
I grew more cautious the closer we got to the farm. The zombies might be mainly sticking to the light, but this close to the centre of the outbreak they’d be spreading out in all directions.
The cabin was completely dark as I approached, so when I saw the door was unchained I decided to get inside, and to safety, as quickly as possible. Hockey stick raised, just in case a zombie had got in ahead of me, I pulled the door open quickly.
The entirely alive poacher inside, a guy slightly younger than myself in hunting clothes and a baseball cap, was up on his feet and had a gun at my nose before I’d even processed the fact that the inside of th
e cabin was well-lit while the outside was dark.
They’d blacked out the windows. Of course they had. They were poachers, they would hardly advertise their presence. They certainly wouldn’t welcome visitors.
Especially visitors waving hockey sticks in the air. I’ll admit, that’s a poor first impression to make.
‘I’M DAVID,’ I said.
It was a perfectly accurate answer to the question I had been asked, although perhaps not as pertinent to the matter as my interrogator might have wished.
I didn’t know what to say. Neither, it seemed, did the poacher pointing the gun at me, or his older friend, who was sat at a wooden table. There was a low portable camp light on the table, and playing cards laid out, mid-game.
‘If I put this down,’ I said, glancing up at the hockey stick, ‘can I come in?’
‘Why do you want to come in here?’ asked the older man. He asked the question in a level voice, but he was nervously tapping the table with a playing card.
‘It’s not safe out there,’ I said. This really wasn’t a conversation I wanted to be having. Any talk of zombies and they’d be more likely to consider me a danger and lock me out.
‘Why, what’s out there?’ said the poacher with the gun. While the other poacher was at least trying to keep his cool, this one wasn’t even trying to hide how twitchy he was. The gun barrel near my nose smelled oily, but behind that there was a distinct smell of booze-sweat, of alcohol seeping from the pores of a habitual drinker.
Whether he was loaded or in withdrawal, neither state bode well for me. I needed to end this conversation and at least get inside the cabin. I could work out how to borrow some of their stuff once the gun was out of my face.
‘There’s been an accident at the lab,’ I said. I lowered the hockey stick in as slow and non-threatening a way as possible, but didn’t let it go just yet.
‘I’m not sure they’re going to believe you,’ interrupted Melissa, who was already inside the cabin, looking around while the two poachers stood oblivious. The seated poacher pulled his coat closer together as Melissa passed through him.