The Dead Walk The Earth II

by Luke Duffy

  Gerry stepped back and nodded over his shoulder.

  Doctor Warren stepped forward. He was carrying a large cylinder made of mesh steel. It did not look too dissimilar to a waste-paper basket but it was clearly more robust. Inside, it was reinforced with a cross-section of metal bars and in the centre was a silver box and what appeared to be a set of speakers attached.

  “Music,” the Doctor said plainly. “You plant these in the desired location then trigger them remotely from a safe distance. We know that the infected are attracted to sound so this should work quite well.”

  The team stared back at him for a moment and shifted their gaze to the bulky object he stood holding in his hands.

  “Did all those years of learning and the PhD you have hanging from your wall help you to come up with that, Doc?” Danny asked.

  “You hadn’t thought of it, had you, Danny?” Bobby nodded with a smile of appreciation to the Doctor. “Simple, but effective.”

  “Well, while some of us are still trying to work out what is causing all this and searching for a cure, the rest of us have dedicated our time to more practical purposes. All the tests we have carried out have revealed nothing, from a scientific sense that is, about this virus and how to stop it. So understanding what makes them tick and using their disadvantages against them is our greatest weapon now, I believe.”

  “Okay,” Bull continued, satisfied that one of his questions had been answered. “How do we get there then?”

  Stan looked at Gerry and then across to Bull.

  “We’re getting a ride from an old friend of mine.”

  9

  The reception area echoed with the thumps of his heavy footfalls as they pounded against the stairs. His breathing came in short strained gasps and resounded loudly inside the open space of the foyer. Each step was physical and mental agony and his pace had reduced to little more than a lumbering stagger as he slowly moved up towards her. His legs trembled uncontrollably and his body quivered as he struggled to prevent himself from vomiting, all the time forcing his tortured thighs to continue their agonising ascent. Sweat poured from him and dripped on to the floor. Pools of perspiration, drool, and snot swathed the rubber-coated steps that were set into the steel staircase. He grunted and wheezed his way upwards. His heart pounded and his lungs felt as though they were pathetically incapable of sucking in the precious oxygen that he so desperately needed. The blurred vision and his spinning head added to his misery but she would never let up on him until he had finished.

  “That’s it, Chris,” she encouraged from the landing above him as she stared at the stopwatch in her hand. “Only a few more steps to go and then you can rest.”

  For the entire week, she had hounded him relentlessly. From the moment that the sun rose until it set on the opposite horizon, she pushed him to the point of collapse and beyond. He was exhausted and each night as Tina slept soundly he lay awake for hours, wincing with aching bones and muscles and crying quietly as he lay enveloped inside his sleeping bag. He had never experienced pain and suffering like it. At the end of each day when darkness shrouded them and he was left with his thoughts he silently wished that he would not wake up the next morning.

  But as the sun made its appearance again and the night gave way to the brightness of day, she would wake him and assault him with her sadistic regime. He was suffering from severe anxiety and faced each new day with a feeling of cold dread in the pit of his stomach. Pain and exhaustion were all that was waiting for him. There was no joy, not even a simple comfort. He would suffer until the sun set and then it would begin all over again when the morning came. He had grown to hate the sounds of the morning birds. They were the harbingers of aching bones, burning muscles, and misery.

  In his eyes, Tina’s training programme was brutal to say the least. For breakfast, he was allowed nothing more than a few dried crackers and a tin of sardines, followed by a litre of water to wash it down. That was one of the hardest parts for him; water. She made him drink litre after litre throughout the whole day and it never failed to make him sick. He would have done anything for a Coke, even a diet one.

  From there she would drag him to the warehouse and starting at the loading bay doors, force him to run from one end of the building to the next, over and over again. All the time she would be howling at him to move faster and to keep going until he was at the point where he could no longer hold on to the meagre meal he had been given and was forced to throw it up, all over the concrete floor.

  He would have to keep going like that for thirty minutes at a time and without rest. Her words of encouragement did nothing for him and the fact that Tina did everything alongside her brother was of no comfort. He failed to understand that she was helping him or that the tough love she was showing him would be for his own benefit in the long run. He saw it as torture and her way of taking out her frustrations.

  After recovering from his morning run, she would allow him to rest physically but the mental training continued. While he lay recovering, sweating profusely, she would begin asking him questions with hypothetical scenarios built in and he was supposed to answer with tactical thinking. She would draw diagrams and maps on a whiteboard and begin grilling him on what he would do in certain situations. In his state of physical exhaustion, he was rarely capable of forming any kind of clear thought in his clouded mind. Instead, he would just sit there staring back at her, feeling numb throughout his entire body.

  After yet another miniscule lunch, she would then go on to instruct him on how to defend himself against the infected. She demonstrated how to use their weapons and how to move and take advantage of the slow and uncoordinated attacks of their enemies, even when greatly outnumbered. Again, he struggled to handle himself in any way that could be of benefit. He was almost as clumsy and uncoordinated as the corpses that lumbered about in the car park outside.

  “We always keep one foot on the ground,” she explained to him in the hope of making him understand the principle of mutual support. “If one of us is dealing with something, the other is watching their back. Whether we’re fighting the infected or changing a light bulb, we have to look out for one another.”

  “Why would we need to change a light bulb?” He had asked in confusion.

  “It was a figure of speech, Chris. The point I’m trying to make is that we don’t let our guard down or become complacent. One of us is always covering the other and we stay prepared and ready to fight, or run.”

  He stared back at her with blank heavy eyes and a throbbing head.

  Still, Tina persisted. She was determined to mould him into something of use. His cries and whimpers fell upon her unsympathetic ears and his pleadings for respite were ignored as she continued to bark orders at him.

  At the top of the stairs, Tina looked down at his sweating hulk as he struggled to lift his feet up onto the final step before reaching the landing. He was bent almost double with his face pointing down towards the steps. From her vantage point, she could only see his wide trembling shoulders and well-rounded back quivering beneath the sodden blue t-shirt that clung to his huge frame. She smiled fleetingly. It was pride that swelled within her. She checked the stopwatch and stepped back as Christopher reached the landing and collapsed into a heap on the cold linoleum floor. He turned onto his back, coughing and sputtering with thick globs of frothy saliva and glistening mucus smeared across his face and down the front of his t-shirt. His skin was bright crimson and even in the semi-light of the corridor that dissected the upstairs offices, she could see the steam rising from his hot skin.

  “Well done, brother,” she said with respect as she bent down and patted him encouragingly on his shoulder.

  She immediately regretted touching him and stood back up, wiping her sweat soaked palms on the front of her trousers.

  “You did it in ten minutes and thirty-five seconds, Chris. That’s twenty seconds faster than yesterday.”

  Christopher was incapable of responding to her words. His eyes were screwed tight a
nd his tongue flopped from the side of his mouth like an overheated dog. He coughed and retched in reply and rolled over onto his side as he continued to gasp for breath. He cared nothing for her enthusiasm. Timings, repetitions, distances, all of it held no meaning for him and he loathed each of them just as much as the next. He was just glad that it was over and that he could rest… for now.

  “Go on, Chris,” Tina said softly. “Go and get yourself cleaned up. I’ll crack on with my session then we can get something to eat before we do our perimeter checks.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Christopher groaned hoarsely. He was still lying on his side with his eyes shut, unable to move from the spot.

  Tina had already begun to make her way down the stairs where she would then begin her own training. She had made a point from the very beginning of never asking her brother to do something that she was not willing to do herself.

  “We’re doing this so that we are ready to fight or run if need be,” she replied with a hint of frustration. She had explained it to him repeatedly over the previous week. “You know that and one day, you’ll thank me for it.”

  Christopher slowly peeled his pain-racked body up from the floor. He made it to the point where he was on his hands and knees and quickly realised that he would not be able to raise himself any further than that. Slowly, with shaking arms and legs that threatened to collapse from underneath him at any moment, he crawled towards the manager’s office where he had every intention of crumpling back to the floor again.

  “We don’t need to run… or fight, you fucking cunt,” he grumbled under his breath as his sister began hammering away at the thirty-five steps behind him.

  He still could not understand why she would ever want to leave the building. They were safe and away from the infected. They had everything they needed and there was no need to set foot out into the open for a long time to come.

  Still puffing and panting, Christopher crawled through the door and into the plush office. The beating sounds of his sister’s feet against the hard stairs faded into the distance as he dragged himself over towards his billowing soft sleeping bag that lay sprawled across the floor at the foot of the smallest leather couch. It called to him seductively, wanting to wrap him up in its comforting embrace.

  He paused for a moment and looked to his left and at the door of the storeroom that was set into the wall beside the huge television screen facing the manager’s desk. Just beyond the wooden barrier lay an Aladdin’s cave of food and delicacies. Tina had moved it all in there at the beginning of the week, locked the door, and kept the key in her possession at all times. She had even gone to the lengths of securing the door to the warehouse so that he could not sneak in there when she was asleep and gorge himself on sugar and carbohydrates. All the vending machines within the building had been broken open and emptied of all but water. There were no safe havens for him or his eating disorder and he was so hungry that the pain in his stomach was unbearable.

  He stared at the storeroom longingly, imagining the stacks of tinned food and boxes of biscuits and chocolate. It was all so near, yet so far away.

  “Fucking bitch,” he whimpered.

  He was about to allow his aching elbows to buckle and his body to collapse but something stopped him from doing so. A noise out from beyond the huge panes of glass that overlooked the parking area grabbed his curiosity. It was the sound of struggling grunting voices. They were aggressive and savage and Christopher had no doubt in his mind that they were the voices of the living dead. His fear rose inside him and as his body crawled towards the window, sucking on the last of his energy reserves, his mind screamed at him not to look. He was still terrified at the sight of the dead, even from beyond the protection of the upper floors of the building, but now he felt compelled to see what was going on.

  Maybe Tina is right? Maybe I am getting stronger… and braver? He thought and smiled proudly.

  Only a week ago, he would never have dreamed of approaching the window on his own accord. It was always down to his sister to force him into facing his fears. At one time, even the sounds of a brass band playing in the car park would not have encouraged him to venture across towards the glass but here he was, brushing his trepidation to the side and forcing himself to confront the dead, albeit from the safety of the top floor of their fortress.

  He pulled the thick blackout curtain to one side slightly and peered out into the bright sunlit car park. There they were. Roughly thirty of them scattered over a wide area and wandering aimlessly. They were revolting figures, all twisted and grotesque. Their flesh torn and their bodies distended with the gases of decay, they stubbornly refused to follow the laws of nature and remain dead.

  Christopher shuddered as he watched their dark menacing forms drifting between the vehicles and swaying with each step. Their arms hung limply and their heads lolled from side to side with blank vacant eyes staring at the ground beneath them. Each had its own eco-system of insects swirling around them that feasted upon their rotting flesh and the grubs that squirmed beneath the surface of their putrefying tissue. Now and then, a bird would dive out of the sky and swoop in to feed on the bloated tiny creatures that buzzed around the corpses.

  A sudden clatter, quickly followed by hostile snarls and groans, erupted from the right of the car park. Christopher snapped his head around and saw two of the infected tussling with one another. They clawed at one another’s faces and snapped their jaws angrily, tearing chunks of flesh from each other’s bones as they grappled, but neither of them paid any notice to the gaping wounds that they inflicted or received. They were fighting over something and on closer inspection Christopher saw that they were having a macabre tug-of-war over what appeared to be the remains of an animal, possibly a cat or a small dog, but he could not be sure from that distance and angle.

  He looked on for a while as both corpses continued to beat at one another. Finally, the larger of the two, a creature that had once been a well-built male, was able to wrestle the remains from the grasp of its smaller opponent. Turning away to protect his meal, the dead man stuffed his face into the carcass and began chewing vigorously, smearing his pallid features with dark red blood and tufts of fur.

  The smaller reanimated body continued trying to retrieve the unfortunate animal and attacked the feeding ghoul from behind. The large man twisted and turned, keeping his back to his challenger whilst continuing his feast. Finally, he had had enough of the interruptions and turned on his adversary. With a single thrust, he grabbed the other’s face in his massive hand and drove it backwards towards one of the cars, all the while keeping a tight grip on the animal in his free hand. The smaller body was caught off balance, and with its attacker’s hand pushed hard against its face, it flew backwards and slammed into the doorframe of the parked saloon. Its head snapped backwards and thumped hard into the roof of the vehicle with an echoing hollow clang, but the big corpse did not leave it there. To ensure himself of no further disturbances while he ate, he continued to pound the smaller creature’s head against the steel frame of the door. Eventually the body became limp and slid to the floor with a large opening in its skull. Its fetid brains oozed out from the cracked bone and ran down over the corpse’s face and dead staring eyes.

  Satisfied, the dead man turned and stumbled away to a secluded area at the side of the car park where he could finish his feast in peace.

  Christopher, far from scared, had watched them with fascination as they fought over the remnants of the poor animal. He stood witness to their unflinching savagery and ravenous hunger as they battled for the scraps of meat. He eyed the other infected bodies that continued to stumble about, unaware of him watching them from the safety of his hideout. They were slow and benign, completely unthreatening in their movements, but fearsome in their appearance. It would not take much to rile them up though. He would not even have to step outside to gain their attention and work them into a frenzy. Just his appearance at the window would be enough to turn them from shambling husks to
tearing and snapping monsters.

  He turned his head to the left and attempted to see along the front of the building and towards the gate that led into the loading area and staff car park. From that angle, it was impossible to see the entrance but he knew that it was there at the end of the fence and that it was still wide open. A thought flitted into his mind and immediately, he shook his head forcefully and shivered.

  Tina was working hard on the stairs. Her stopwatch indicated that she too was about to shave off a number of seconds from her training session of the previous day. She had just two more repetitions to go. Breathing hard and soaked in sweat, she was feeling good. She smiled at the thought of how she had grown to love, even crave, the pain of hard exercise. She relished the dull ache in her thighs as they were flooded with lactic acid and she had become accustomed to the feeling of her chest tightening as her lungs battled to take in oxygen. So many times, she had tried to convey this to her brother; that he would one day grow to yearn for the discomfort. That it would make him feel alive and filled with euphoria, but he could never seem to accept or understand.

  She reached the bottom step and turned to begin her last ascent. As she placed her foot on the first rung, a large shadow drifted over the stairwell. She looked up to see Christopher standing at the top and staring down at her.

  “Hey,” she began, “you’re recovering faster already. You would still be breathing through your arse at this point last week. See, I told you.”

  Christopher said nothing but continued to watch her as she sprinted up the final flight and came to a panting stop in front of him. She clicked the stopwatch and checked the time.

  “Thirty-five fucking seconds faster,” she whooped with a wide grin.

  He nodded and looked down at the timer in her hands and smiled fleetingly at her. He was still sweating and beads of moisture continued to drip from his hairline and over his flushed face but she was right, he was recovering much quicker now. Apart from his legs that were still shaking slightly and the slowly receding burn in his chest, he felt fine.