The Dead Walk The Earth II

by Luke Duffy

  However, none of its grandeur was of any use to either of them. Water no longer flowed from the taps or the showerhead and the toilet could not be flushed. The light inside the room was provided by one of the camping lamps they had looted from the warehouse and the shower cubicle now had a portable shower-bag hanging from the ceiling. Water was not to be wasted but Tina had insisted that they do their best to keep a good level of hygiene whenever possible. She had lectured him on how important it was to keep clean in the field.

  ‘A debilitating infection, caused through lack of personal administration, is a self-inflicted wound,’ was how she had described it to him.

  In place of a functioning toilet, they had installed a large bucket with a seat attached to the top of it. It was half filled with sand and a dozen bottles of bleach sat beside it for disinfecting after use. Christopher stared at the makeshift latrine for a moment and then looked up at the wall above it. Tina had written the house rules in big black letters over the tiles. They included things such as the washing of hands, the use of the bleach, and the consideration of others. The final commandment was double the thickness and size of the other letters and below it, connected to a self-adhesive hook, dangled a small plastic spade like the sort used by children at the beach.

  ‘YOU POOP, YOU SCOOP!’

  All the rules and regulations that his sister was piling upon him were beginning to wear him down. She decided when they would eat, when they would sleep, and how they went to the bathroom. She had even gone to the length of checking him over to make sure he had been washing himself. He wondered how much longer it would be before she began stripping him down and scrubbing him herself.

  Now she was telling him that he could not eat what he wanted anymore. That really affected him because it had been, and still was, his only real joy in life. Computer games and movies had been a welcome distraction from reality but he had always had to drag himself away from them at some point. Food, however, was his only true friend. It had comforted him throughout his twenty-seven years and it was always there for him. Now, his sister was trying to snatch it away from him.

  He began to weep. He was miserable and wanted the world to leave him alone. He missed his mother and he missed his bedroom at her house. There he was treated well and he wanted for nothing. He was allowed to sit playing his games all day and into the early hours of the morning. He never needed to worry about anything because his mother did it all for him. She washed his clothes for him and brought him his food. She was a great cook and she even prompted him when she thought he needed a shower. He did not have to think for himself or deal with the day-to-day hardships that the rest of the human race had to contend with.

  Rivers were now pouring down his cheeks and cascading from his voluminous jowls. Even his t-shirt was beginning to become soaked through. His shoulders shook with each quivering sob as he fought hard to remain quiet so that Tina did not hear him and launch a fresh assault on his already delicate mind.

  I hate her.

  Deep down, he always had. When they were young, he had felt inferior and threatened by his sister. By the time he was eight years old he was grossly overweight and incapable of being anywhere near as active as she was. From his bedroom window, he used to watch her playing football with the boys from the estate or racing up and down the street on skateboards and bikes. She was accepted as one of them whereas he had been shunned. They had called him names and chased him into his house when he had tried to befriend them, but they had readily welcomed his sister into their ranks.

  She was pretty but never bothered with the things that most girls were in to. She was not interested in dolls and make-up, and always preferred jeans filled with holes and stains as averse to frilly dresses and pretty shoes.

  She was popular with everyone that she met. She was witty and outspoken and regardless of what she said or did, Tina always seemed to come out on top of things and could do no wrong in the eyes of the people around her.

  While he sat in his room, lonely and rejected, she would disappear for hours on end climbing trees, building camps, and generally being one of the boys. It was always made worse with the fact that their father clearly favoured her more than him. She was a ‘chip off the old block’ as far as their father had been concerned. Tina was an adventurer like him and they did a lot together when she was growing up.

  Christopher had barely notice when their father died. He was only thirteen at the time and felt nothing of the kind of grief that befell his sister when he passed. While Tina struggled to come to terms with the loss, Christopher was smothered all the more by his mother and that suited him just fine as he revelled in her loving warmth.

  Growing up, he had never had a girlfriend either. He was shy and had no idea how to talk to them. There were many that he had fancied in school and such, but he had never plucked up the courage to approach them. The fact that he was always being told that he smelled bad by the girls as they looked at him with expressions of revulsion never helped his confidence or self-esteem. He slowly withdrew into his room and became a recluse. He found contentment in food, movies, and computer games. However, he had an abundance of virtual friends all over the world who he communicated with via the internet gaming forums and settled for that as his lot in life.

  All that suddenly changed though when the dead began to walk. His mother contracted the flue and died a few days after the first government announcements about the spread of the plague. After seeing the effects of the virus on the news and the World Wide Web, he locked her in her room, unable to do the terrible thing that the world beyond his front door advised him to do and ensure that she did not come back.

  Tina had arrived a few days later, her clothes tattered and soaked with blood. It was she who killed their mother. It was she who dragged him out from the safety of their home and into the dangerous world. It was she who forced him to scrounge for food and shelter, and it was she who forced him to run everywhere.

  Now she was telling him that he had to train every day, even though they were safe and did not need to worry about what was happening outside. He hated running. He hated any kind of physical exercise and she was going to force him to endure pain and suffering while she shouted at him to keep going and treated him like a diseased dog. She was going to make him starve and suffer from the pains of hunger.

  Fucking bitch.

  He wiped away the tears that had ceased to flow as his anger grew and his bitterness swelled within him. In their place came a rage he had never felt before. His temper flared and his skin became hot to the touch as he thought about how much he loathed his sister. His teeth began to grind as he simmered with anger.

  “I’ll show you,” he whispered as he reached behind him and pulled the pistol from the back of his jeans. “Yeah, I’ll show you who’s tough, sis.”

  He looked down at the dull black metal of the weapon as he held it in his hand. He stroked it lovingly with an affection that most people would reserve for a pet. It was a Glock-19. He had seen them in movies and had read about them on Wikipedia when researching the net for the weapons he was using during his online gaming. Out of the fifteen rounds that the magazine was capable of holding, he had six left. The pistol did not have a safety-catch so he had decided against keeping a round in the chamber for fear of it going off while tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

  He hefted it in his palm as he admired its sleek shape and cold steel black finish. Standing up from the toilet, he stared back at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. For a fleeting moment, he saw Gerard-fucking-Butler and he smiled broadly, as he raised the pistol into the aim.

  “You think you’re better than me, don’t you, Tina?” He huffed. “You think I can’t look after myself, don’t you? Well, I’ll show you. You’ll regret the things you said and I will show you how wrong you are about me, Tina.”

  Holding the gun in one hand, then with two, he tried out a number of different stances and pulled various faces as he fantasised about being the strong t
ough man he had always wanted to be. Next, his eyes glazed slightly and with a half-cocked smile, he adopted the stance of an extremely casual and nonchalant character from a movie he had once seen as the hero coolly took on a band of bad guys that vastly outnumbered him. With assured death hanging over him, he lazily raised the Glock in his hand with a less than steady aim and pointed it towards the sink.

  “You talking to me?” He asked as he began a conversation with the man staring back at him in the mirror.

  “Well who the hell else are you talking to?”

  He raised his free hand and pointed to his own chest.

  “You talking to me?”

  He paused for a moment and shook his head with a menacing glint in his eyes, the half-smile still creasing his lips.

  “Well, I’m the only one here. So who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

  Christopher turned himself side on to the mirror and folded his hands across his chest with a cocky and dismissive shake of the head.

  “Oh yeah? Yeah, okay,” he said as a final statement before pulling his pistol out from beneath the rolls of fat that encased his upper arms and pointing it at his reflection. The movement was clumsy and slow and resembled nothing of the speed that the hero of the movie had been able to manipulate the weapon with.

  “Yeah, fuck you, Tina,” he snarled and made a noise similar to that which a child would make when trying to imitate the sound of a gunshot.

  He rubbed his sweaty palms over his face and then grinned at himself in the mirror as he tucked the pistol back into his jeans and headed for the door.

  “You’re wrong about me, Tina,” he whispered before opening the door. “I’ll show you that you’re wrong.”

  8

  The sound of the alarms blasted out over the entire island. Shattering the morning air, their rising and falling wails sent panic coursing along the nerves and through the minds of everyone who heard their mechanical and endless shrieks.

  Stan and his men gathered on the crest of the hill close to their home and looked down into the valley below. They were armed and ready to face whatever threat came their way. A habit grown from years of soldiering, their weapons and ammunition were never more than an arm’s reach away from them. They travelled with them, sat with them, and they even ate and slept with their rifles close by.

  Although they were at a distance of nearly three kilometres, they could clearly hear the terrified screams of men, women, and children as they tore through the dense clusters of tents and makeshift corrugated iron shelters within the fenced areas of the refugee camp. They ran in all directions in fear and confusion as the outbreak spread like wild fire and up on the high ground, it was impossible to identify the healthy from the infected. It was complete chaos. Soon, the sounds of gunfire drowned out the horrified cries of the refugees and the blasts from the sirens. While the shots echoed out across the landscape, the team watched on as dozens of civilians died.

  “Take William inside,” Stan ordered to Taff without taking his attention away from the scene in the low ground. “Get the place locked down and secure until we’re sure that none of them have broken out beyond the barricades.”

  “Will do, Stan,” Taff replied gruffly. He turned to the young boy and began leading him back towards the barn. “Come on, Billy, let’s get you and your mum safe. You don’t need to be seeing this sort of thing.”

  “What do we do?” Marty asked as he scanned the length of the camp with the scope attached to the top of his M-4 rifle.

  “Nothing,” Stan replied indifferently. “It’s up to the camp guards to sort out. We’ll just stay put and keep an eye on our own perimeter.”

  When they first arrived on the island and selected the barn as their base, their first action had been to make the area secure. While Stan, Bobby, and Taff lay recovering in the field hospital the others had set about building defensive positions that utilised the lay of the land. Obstacles and barbed wire entanglements were placed in key locations, denying access from the various routes in and channelling anyone who approached the house into a killing zone. It was virtually impossible for a person to sneak up on the position without someone having them in their sights. Any blind spots or dead ground was laced with trip-wires attached to a rudimentary early warning system of cans and bottles that would clash together and alert the team to someone approaching. It was simple but extremely effective.

  Danny and Bobby remained on the hilltop observing the outbreak and guarding the area around their home. For a long while they did not speak. They just looked on in silence as the anarchy spread amongst the refugees.

  “You see much?” Bobby asked as he reached across to Danny and took his turn with the binoculars.

  “Not really, no,” Danny replied quietly and still watching the sprawling refugee camp. “I can see the militia at the fence line and in the towers, but not much else. Everyone seems to have disappeared over to the other side.”

  Bobby scanned along the length of mesh fencing and barbed wire. At first, there was nothing of note, then something caught his eye. To the left he saw what he took to be a gaggle of infected but he soon realised that they were in fact living people who were running from the outbreak. After a moment of scrutiny, he guessed them to be a family group, trapped and attempting to find a way through the fence. He watched as they managed to make a hole big enough to squeeze themselves through but they were soon struggling to fight their way out from the multiple rolls of razor wire that encircled the entire compound. They became ensnared within the steel coils and the more they thrashed and struggled, the more entwined they became. Their fear was evident in their desperate actions and it was easy to make out the people shouting to one another for help as they wriggled and squirmed and all the while became more enmeshed by the sharp barbs of the wire.

  Bobby presumed them to be a mother and father with a teenage boy and girl, along with another child who could not have been older than five or six. As the gunfire continued to reverberate up to them on the hilltop, he saw a vehicle approaching along the fence line from the north and come to a halt in front of the area where the family were trapped. He tightened his grip on the binoculars and adjusted the focus.

  The truck, a large civilian flatbed, blocked his view of what was happening but he could clearly identify the small band of militia guards as they climbed down from the cabin. They disappeared from sight around the far side of the vehicle and a few moments later, they emerged again and climbed back inside the truck before driving away. Once that the flatbed was gone, Bobby could see the limp and bloodied family lying in the mud beneath the heavy coils of wire. None of them were moving. The guards could have helped the defenceless people but instead they had executed all of them with single shots to their heads to ensure they did not return. He felt his blood run cold and his anger rise within him.

  “Bastards,” he snarled.

  He panned the binoculars to the right and watched as the militia vehicle headed further along the fence to join up with the rest of their group and continue the battle to regain control of the outbreak. They jumped down from their truck and moved towards the fence where they began firing indiscriminately into the camp and at anything they saw moving within the enclosure. Their rounds boomed across the open ground and with each report, Bobby blinked involuntarily.

  Danny glanced at him nervously and then back towards the city of tents that continued to echo with the sound of gunfire and screams.

  “Some of those civilian militia are worse than concentration camp guards,” he murmured after having witnessed the events for himself and seeing the disgusted and rage fuelled expression on Bobby’s face. “You never know though, those people may have been bitten and infected.”

  “Fucking bastards,” Bobby repeated, shaking his head and flexing the muscles in his jaw as he ground his teeth.

  He knew in his bones that the family had not been infected and were just trying to escape from the virus. He looked back at the flatbed and watched it as it began to
move again and finally came to a stop outside a small brick building that was used as their main guardroom. He counted the men and eyed the approaches along the track on the outer perimeter of the fence line. He grunted and nodded to himself as he made his mental notes. There were four of them stationed in that particular building. There may have been one more, possibly a regular professional soldier to act as their commander, but Bobby could not be one-hundred percent sure from that range.

  When the ‘all clear’ was given and the clearance teams had confirmed that none of the infected had escaped from the camp, life returned to normal on the Isle of Wight. The doctors and soldiers moved into the refugee enclosure and cleared the dead for collection and incineration details. They checked on any wounds sustained during the battle and although it was never openly acknowledged, everyone knew what happened to the people who were taken away for ‘treatment’ of suspected bites. They were never seen again.

  Bobby wondered how many men, women, and children had been dealt with in this way through wrongful diagnosis. The doctors and soldiers took no chances and to a degree, he could not blame them, but there was always the time and facilities available to afford a more thorough examination. Death and reanimation from a bite was never instantaneous.

  Bobby’s mind drifted back to Danny’s statement about the militia being no different from the guards of a concentration camp. They rounded the civilians up like cattle and arbitrarily set aside anyone they did not like the look of.

  “Bastards,” he snorted again.

  “It’s done now, Bobby. There’s nothing we can do and besides, it’s none of our business what goes on down there. We have our own shit to worry about.”