Year of the Zombie (Book 8): Scratch

by Moody, David

  Not a bad effort. It landed a metre or so in front of her feet.

  The infected’s mode of movement changed. It appeared almost insect-like now, on all fours and face up, scuttling. And then it launched itself into the air. Jody grabbed the handle of the garden fork and lifted its sharp tines skyward, just in the nick of time. The creature landed on top of it and was skewered through the groin.

  Jody dropped the fork and stepped away.

  The infected monster still fought, still tried to scratch at her, but it was struggling to work out why it could no longer get about with the same degree of freedom as before. It was like having an inflexible extra leg, an unwanted extension. Such was its angle that whenever it tried to take a step forward, the handle of the fork dug into the ground and pivoted the whole body around, at the same time driving the spikes deeper into its diseased flesh.

  Gary was already in the shed. Jody followed him into the cluttered little wooden building. She pulled her scarf down to berate him. ‘This place is a fucking pigsty.’

  ‘You can stop nagging me now,’ he said as he began to ferret through a mountain of crap. ‘We’re divorced, remember? I’ve got Charlie to moan at me now.’

  ‘So I guess there’s still plenty to moan about then?’

  ‘Shut up, Jody,’ he said, and he passed two bottles of barbecue lighter fluid to her, carrying two more himself.

  ‘Why so many?’

  ‘Because we have – we had – a lot of barbecues. We’re not all bitter and twisted and antisocial like you.’

  ‘I’m not antisocial. Some of us have responsibilities.’

  ‘We both have responsibilities, now let’s get this over with and get back inside.’

  ‘Fine. You got a match?’

  He scavenged about on another cobwebby shelf and found a barbecue lighter: a long, bizarre-looking gas-fuelled thing like a cigarette lighter with a barrel. ‘This’ll do it.’

  ‘Hardly standard zombie-killing kit, is it?’

  He laughed at that. Was he laughing with her or at her? She wasn’t sure. ‘Zombies,’ he repeated, shaking his head.

  ‘Well what else are we supposed to call them?’ she asked as she squeezed past him to get back outside. ‘They’re dead and they’re infected and they want to kill us. Therefore, they’re zombies.’

  ‘You really could turn anything into an argument.’

  ‘That’s because your default setting is to pick holes in everything I say.’

  He was about to correct her, but she’d already gone. She was halfway up the garden, heading for the impaled creature which was on its back now, unable to get up. She doused it with lighter fluid then stepped back and watched with satisfaction as Gary lit it up. Typical bloke, she thought, always got to be in control of the fire.

  Between them they then drenched the figures at the window from behind with the flammable liquid, Jody tried gesturing to the kids and Charlie to avert their gaze, but the frantic, random movements of the infected corpses got in the way. The dumb things didn’t notice the liquid splashing against their backs, didn’t react at all. They didn’t react when Gary lit them up like scarecrows either. The one that still had a head did eventually turn around, though, swivelling on leaden legs. It came towards Jody but lost its footing as flames overwhelmed it. It picked itself back up again, but Jody stood her ground, ready to repel its attack with a melon-sized rock taken from a nearby overgrown rockery. She shifted position awkwardly as she waited for it to reach her and she lifted the rock high, ready to bring it crashing down on the back of the abhorrent thing’s head.

  It didn’t get that far.

  Consumed by billowing flames, the monster dropped to its knees then fell flat. Jody watched the fire for a while longer, hypnotised by the bright light and unexpectedly comforting heat.

  When she looked up, she realised it was getting dark. It was spitting with rain, too.

  When she looked up, she realised she was alone. Gary was back inside with Charlie and the kids. Her kids.

  ***

  The children were alternately scared and excited. Being here was an adventure. Most importantly, they were with Dad. The time they spent with him had been at a premium since he and Mum had had that big falling out after the Christmas before last. Being with him now helped them block out everything else that was happening.

  In some ways the three adults were more scared than the kids. Emotions, grudges and regrets had been put to one side and temporarily forgotten; conveniently shelved until normality returned. If normality returned. But cabin fever was setting in, and the atmosphere frequently became fractious. ‘You don’t really need to stay here, you know,’ Gary said, watching his ex-wife across the kitchen table.

  ‘What, you think I’m going to leave my kids with you? No bloody way.’

  ‘I’ll be here too,’ Charlie said (and immediately wished she hadn’t).

  ‘No, thanks,’ Jody snapped. ‘No offence, love, but I hardly know you. Like I said, I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Great,’ Gary said, and he shoved his chair back and fetched himself another beer.

  ‘Is that a good idea with everything that’s going on?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Fucking great,’ he said as he stormed out of the room. ‘Now I’ve got both of you moaning at me.’

  They watched him leave. ‘Sorry,’ Jody said to Charlie. ‘That was my fault.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ she said, and it was clear it wasn’t. ‘As it happens, I’m with you. If it was my kids I wouldn’t want to go anywhere either.’

  ‘We can’t stay here indefinitely, though.’

  ‘You can. At least until things have calmed down again, anyway.’

  ‘I think he’d have something to say about that,’ she said, gesturing at the door through which Gary had just disappeared.

  ‘Leave him to me.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ Jody said instinctively. She stopped herself. ‘Sorry. My bad. It’s just that he’s caused me so much shit over the last eighteen months, so much hurt... it’s hard to change my tune just like that, you know?’

  ‘I know. If it’s any consolation, it’s been as hard on him from what I’ve seen. He acts the big man, but I’ve seen him in tears over those kids on more than one occasion.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure you have...’

  ‘Anyway, no more arguments, you’re staying here until this whole sorry mess gets sorted, agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  The conversation faltered, and for a while the silence weighed heavy on the room. ‘So what do we do?’ Jody eventually asked. ‘Do we all just sit here and wait?’

  ‘Don’t see we have much of an option,’ Charlie replied. ‘Way I see it we should—’

  More screams. Upstairs this time. Jody thundered up to the bedrooms, but Gary was there before her. Holly was standing on the landing, soaked through. ‘Nightmare,’ he explained. ‘She wet the bed.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart. It’s okay.’

  Jody instinctively reached out for her daughter but Gary blocked her. ‘I’ve got this,’ he said as he picked up his little girl. She buried her face in his chest, still crying.

  And Jody could only look on helpless as he carried Holly into the bedroom he and Charlie shared and shut the door behind him.

  ***

  When Jody next opened her eyes, the unfamiliar house looked more unfamiliar still. The morning light was cold and grey and it felt as if it was being filtered... blocked somehow. After Holly’s nightmare and Gary’s response last night she’d been left feeling unequivocally redundant and had fallen asleep at the kitchen table, head down on a wicker placemat which had covered half her face with indentations and lines. It had hurt being shut out. She struggled with seeing Gary with her children and had to remind herself constantly that they were his kids too. The connection between him and her had been irreparably broken, yet the bond between him and the children was as strong as it had ever been. It made her feel like an intruder. This place where she’d only spent hours
, they’d spent days. She was a visitor here, but this house was a part of her children’s lives. It hurt far more than she thought it would have. It bothered her more than anything else that was happening.

  The light down here this morning was weird, though.

  The back of the house was clear. She got up and checked. The garden looked completely normal, save for the surreal remnants of yesterday’s battle: three charred corpses, one all but headless, another still impaled on the garden fork. In her fitful sleep last night, when she’d been flickering between the conscious and unconscious, she’d dreamt they were still coming for her, all crispy skin, burned away muscle and shrivelled up hair. But the infected hadn’t moved, thankfully, and no more had arrived.

  She drank a glass of ice-cold water as she walked through the downstairs of the sprawling house. At the front of the building was a dining room in the middle of renovations. The paper was half-stripped from the walls and a large chimney breast had been knocked out and was in the process of being re-plastered. At first she was distracted trying to imagine what the room would look like when it was finished, but such thoughts were immediately forgotten when she saw a crowd of dead faces gathered at the window. She slowly retraced her footsteps out, praying they hadn’t seen her. She counted six of them up against the glass, blocking most of the light. Clawing. Salivating. Drooling.

  No need to panic, she thought. It was no surprise really. After what had happened in the back garden yesterday, this was only to be expected. It was good in a perverse way, she thought, because by drawing those horrific sick things out into the light, it made them easier for the authorities to round up and get rid of when they finally made it to here.

  Jody climbed the stairs. She needed to pee and to shower so she could start to feel human again. Maybe then she’d check the news and see if progress was continuing to be made or whether the human race was still teetering on the edge of the apocalypse. With a bit of luck, she thought, she might be out of here with the kids and on the way home by the end of today. Funny how the thought of prising the children away from their dad – prolonged goodbyes, tears and tantrums, them not wanting to leave him and him not wanting to let them go – made her feel more anxious than the chaos outside. At least she had Charlie here to help. She seemed a sensible girl (save for the fact she’d shacked up with Gary).

  Jody paused at the top of the stairs and fiddled with the venetian blinds. She had trouble getting them to open – the unfamiliarity of being in someone else’s house. She immediately wished she hadn’t bothered.

  The crowd outside this house wasn’t any worse than it had appeared from downstairs, but there were other small pockets of infection around other houses. One house in particular she noticed, across the road and down a little way, appeared to have been completely surrounded. If there were ‘normal’ people trapped in there, she thought, they had little chance of getting out. Every exit was blocked. Infection and disease at every door and window.

  But it was another house which caught her eye. Directly opposite. The infected there were clamouring around the front door, scratching at it, appearing almost to be squabbling with each other to get inside. And as she watched, she saw it was because the people in the house were reacting. Panicking. An elderly man was visible through a downstairs window. He was brandishing a golf club, ready to use it as a weapon. ‘That’s Derek,’ Gary said, startling her. She spun around and saw him standing behind her, dressed only in a pair of boxers, carrying Holly. He handed her over to her mum and Jody turned back to the window.

  ‘He’d better not be about to do what I think he is,’ she said.

  ‘He’s an arsehole. Proper angry bastard.’

  Jody scowled at his language, but she had to agree. Derek certainly seemed to be an arsehole or at the very least incredibly stupid. He was outside now, having climbed out through his dining room window so he could get behind the infected bodies converging on his front door. Jody covered Holly’s eyes and looked away herself as he started swinging his golf club at the nearest of them, hacking it down.

  Neighbour Derek appeared to be venting all his considerable frustrations on just one of the undead. Think about the blood, you idiot, she silently warned him, but it was too late. The figure was on the ground at his feet now, and what was left of its head was like a deflated football, concave. Contaminated blood was splashing everywhere, soaking Derek’s slippers and his pyjama bottoms.

  The other infected were responding now. It was as if they shared a hive mind, but there was no complex connection between them and no real communication, just the shared instinctive desire to spread their foul disease as far as possible. While Derek was distracted with one of them, four more surrounded him. He realised at the last possible moment. Using the head of his bloodied golf club to push another one of them out of the way, Derek tried to fight his way back to the dining room window. The way through was blocked. His wife – ‘Sandra,’ Gary whispered, ‘a real busybody’ – watched helplessly from inside, desperately wanting to help him get in, but at the same time knowing she couldn’t risk opening the window. She gestured furiously towards the front door and, in the midst of the bodies and the sudden madness, Derek ran for it, shoulder-charging more of the creatures out of the way as he did.

  He almost made it, too.

  He reached for the door handle and opened it, just as one of the infected struck. With one outstretched hand, a hideous, loping thing which used to be a woman of similar age and build to Jody grabbed the collar of Derek’s dressing gown and pyjama top and pulled them down. With the other hand she dragged her claws down his back, carving four deep red furrows in his pale and flabby flesh.

  In the end, the fact Derek was now infected didn’t really matter. It was all academic as far as the rest of his family was concerned. He managed to get the door open and half-ran, half-fell inside. He tripped up the step and lay sprawled in his hallway, unable to get up because a veritable flood of crazed dead creatures were trampling over him to get to the others inside.

  Jody turned away, sick to her stomach.

  ***

  It was only seven am, but it felt much, much later.

  This uncomfortable, unnaturally extended family had already exhausted all options for the day. Jody found it increasingly difficult to keep up the pretence. Everything’s going to be all right... Mummy and Daddy are getting along just fine...

  Like fuck.

  At least there were promising signs on the news. The fight against the infection had continued overnight, and the spread of the disease had been virtually halted. It was a question now of clearing the infected zone (as they were calling it on TV). Gary and Charlie’s house was smack bang in the middle of the zone, Jody’s house was just on the clean side of the border. Those trapped alongside the infection had two options – stay put and wait for help, or drive to one of the decontamination checkpoints and get the hell out of Dodge. As frustrating as it was, Jody thought the sensible option was to wait.

  She was just about managing to keep her emotions in check when Ben kicked off. He was a smart kid, but prone to losing his temper when things didn’t go his way. And this morning, they hadn’t. It was a load of noise over nothing – an argument over a game controller and who was watching which TV – but all six of them were involved. Jody tried to pacify Ben, then Gary criticised the way she was speaking to him, then Charlie told Gary he was out of order, then Gary told Charlie to butt out, then Jenny told Gary not to be mean, then Ben screamed at Holly because while they’d all been arguing she’d started watching a DVD on the TV he wanted... and so it continued.

  It didn’t matter who started the argument or what it was about, the focus inevitably shifted to Gary and Jody. ‘I need to get out of here,’ Jody said in frustration.

  ‘Probably for the best if you go,’ Gary agreed.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘I can’t stay here.’

  ‘You can. We’ve already had this conversation.’

  ‘
No, I can’t. I can’t stay here with him.’

  ‘Best news I’ve heard all morning,’ Gary muttered.

  ‘I’m on fumes, though,’ Jody said, turning her back on her ex and speaking directly to Charlie.

  ‘Not a problem,’ Gary answered, quick as a flash. ‘Charlie’s car’s in the garage. Fill your car from hers.’

  ‘Or just take my car,’ Charlie suggested.

  ‘Even better,’ Gary said.

  ‘I’m not planning on going anywhere for a long time. The keys are hanging up in the kitchen.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Cool. Okay. Thanks. I’ll get all our stuff together and we’ll be out of your way.’

  Gary’s expression changed and he manoeuvred himself back into the centre of the conversation. ‘Wait, wait, wait... what do you mean, we?’

  Surely that was obvious?

  ‘What do you think I mean? Me and the kids.’

  ‘You think I’m going to let you take my kids out into that madness outside?’

  Another trick question?

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I think. It’s not really up to you, is it?’

  ‘Not happening.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. Christ, I’m not happy about you looking after them as it is. Especially not now with all this shit going on.’

  ‘Well the judge was happier with me looking after them than you, remember?’

  Charlie sensed the tension rising rapidly. She’d felt less uncomfortable when the infected had attacked the back of the house yesterday afternoon. She ushered the kids out of the room. ‘Come on, you three, let’s go get you some breakfast sorted.’

  ‘Things have changed...’ Gary started to say before Jody cut across him.

  ‘The judge ruled that the kids stay with me. He said you couldn’t give them the stability or care that I could, remember?’

  ‘That was before all this shit kicked off.’

  ‘What, you think we can forget about the law because the outside world has turned into a horror movie? You think you’re somehow better equipped to cope now?’