Burden of Survival

by Richard Murray

  The beam of light hit the table in the centre of the room and the still figure that lay bound atop it. The zombie’s one remaining eye stared unblinkingly at me as it watched me and I smiled at it, not that it seemed to know the difference between a smile and a scowl.

  “No problems?” I asked.

  “Saw a couple of shamblers wander past the other day,” Gregg said. “They didn’t pay much attention to the house. Reckon the stink has them thinking it’s just more of them living here.”

  “What about from these?”

  Gregg looked around the cellar, taking in each of the bound forms that surrounded the table in the centre.

  “Nothing much to report. They chew off the gags occasionally but that’s about it. They can’t get free.”

  I looked over at the closest zombie. It lay on the floor chewing on the cloth that had been wrapped around its face. A blanket had been wrapped tightly around its body holding its arms and legs immobile, then rope had been used to bind that tightly enough that it couldn’t move. It lay there wriggling slightly as it struggled at its bonds.

  “Let’s get that one upstairs,” I said. “It’s time to see what’s making them work.”

  Chapter 4

  Lily

  I pulled my friend into the comforting embrace she so obviously needed as my mind raced with the enormity of the problem I had just been handed.

  A baby was going to be hard at the best of times but during the apocalypse! Well it would be beyond hard even if we had any of the required equipment and medical staff. The best we had was Gabby, a veterinarian in her past life.

  “Have you told anyone else?” I asked.

  She shook her head against my shoulder and murmured softly that she hadn’t. I stroked her head gently as I considered what to do.

  “Okay, first things first, we need to speak to Gabby,” I said. “She’s the closest thing we have to a midwife. Then you need to speak to Pat.”

  “We were so careful,” she said with a sob. “Both of us knew how hard a baby would be.”

  “Accidents happen,” I agreed. “Nothing is one hundred percent guaranteed to work.”

  “He’ll be mad.”

  “I very much doubt he will be,” I said. “That’s your panic talking.”

  We were starting to attract attention from the people around us and I didn’t think it best for everyone to know just yet so I gently turned my friend away from the doors.

  “Let’s go and find Gabby.”

  “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For being so understanding,” Cass said as she wiped at her eyes.

  I stared at her in surprise. This woman who I had personally seen standing firm against zombie hordes, who had fought and lived beside me, who stood by her friends even when she found out they were a serial killer… she wanted to thank me for not being pissed that her birth control didn’t work?

  “Come on,” I said gently. “Let’s go see Gabby.

  Rather than go through the main house where people were starting to stir and go about their daily tasks, I led her around the side. It gave her a little time to compose herself and we stopped when out of sight of everyone to let her wipe at her eyes with a tissue from the pack I kept in my pocket.

  When she was ready, we continued on until we came to what we’d laughingly dubbed the ‘kitchen.’

  Since the actual kitchen inside the house was connected to a propane tank, it did work… just not very well for seventy people. The answer to that was to build something a little more suitable to our needs.

  With the aid of some cement and bricks scavenged from Windermere when we still had access to the greater carrying capacity of the passenger boat, we managed to build a row of brick ovens.

  They weren’t always ideal and were barely more than rudimentary but they actually worked. Through the winter we’d burnt wood in them and made all manner of warm meals the group could all enjoy.

  The last scavenging run had turned up a number of sacks of flour and yeast in an abandoned bakery. In short time we were making our own bread. It was rough stuff to be fair but it was a filling staple of our diet.

  A number of tent poles and tarpaulin had been used to make a shelter over the row of ovens which had made using them during the worst of winter, if not pleasant then at least tolerable. The undisputed leader of the ‘kitchen’ was Annalise.

  “Young lady,” Annalise called as she saw us approach. “I need a word.”

  “Oh what now,” I muttered and received a companionable squeeze of my hand from Cass. I was supposed to be comforting her not the other way around.

  “Young lady, we really must speak.”

  “What can I do for you?” I asked. My voice was carefully neutral and I resisted the urge to look away from her. If I let her have her own way she’d walk all over me.

  The grey haired woman wore a white apron over her faded blue jeans and thick coat. I wasn’t entirely sure how she managed it, but her aprons were always clean.

  “I’ve been told you have some pigs,” she said and I blinked in surprise. Who told you that?

  “You’re mistaken,” I said.

  “No, no. You have pigs and you won’t let us cook them,” Annalise said. “We need fresh meat, more than just the fish from the lake.”

  “Any animals out there the zombies could catch, were killed,” I said carefully. “The only animals we have are the chickens.”

  “We need their eggs more than their meat,” Cass added and I smiled my thanks to her.

  “You have pigs and we need them,” Annalise repeated. “The children are hungry.”

  “We’re all hungry,” I said. Keep calm I told myself.

  “What about your friends from Coniston?” she demanded. “They take our fish, what do we get in return?”

  “We get many things in return that we don’t have,” Cass said. “Tools and salt for a start.”

  “Bah, we can find that ourselves. We need meat.”

  “You want meat, there’s a difference, “I said. “Now if you don’t need anything else…”

  “You have pigs’ young lady and you need to share them with us,” she said crossly.

  “What makes you think we have these animals?”

  “I hear things,” she said with a sudden secretive smile. “You and your friends are keeping them for yourself. Maybe I should ask a few people what they think of that eh?”

  “If you have any concerns you can bring them up tomorrow night when we have the weekly meeting,” I said. I was barely holding my temper in check but the insufferable woman was pushing my buttons. “You can raise them there and we will answer you.”

  “You need to watch yourself young lady,” Annalise said. “We know you’re keeping secrets.”

  “I can assure you I’m not,” I said. “Now please excuse me. I have business to attend to.”

  Without waiting for another answer I gently steered Cass around the woman and walked towards the rear doors of the house. A quick glance behind as I went inside showed the bothersome woman to be standing where we’d left her, watching us.

  “How does she know?” Cass whispered.

  “Someone’s been talking but I couldn’t think who that would be,” I said. “I’m going to find out though.”

  “She’ll raise it tomorrow. You know that right?”

  “Yes more than likely.”

  “Which means we’ll have to lie to them outright or tell them the truth.”

  “That would lead to questions we daren’t have people asking,” I said with a sigh. “For now, let’s get you to Gabby. I have a thousand things to do today and that’s before I send someone to find out where the Coniston people are while I’m stuck here.”

  “You don’t need to take me,” Cass said with sudden concern. “I know you’re busy.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “There’s nothing more important than you right this minute.”

  Gabb
y wasn’t especially hard to find. She’d taken over one of the rooms of the house and used it as an improvised surgery. Anyone with medical complaints could visit her and she would use the limited medical knowledge she had about humans to try and help them.

  I made a mental note to add medical textbooks to the list of items that were needed. She did a great job with what she had, but the training she’d received had been in dealing with animals. Sooner or later someone would come to her with a uniquely human complaint and her lack of knowledge could lead to death.

  Her surgery was sparse with just a low desk covered with notes and scraps of paper. The veterinarian sat in an office chair, one hand pressed to her temple while the other held pieces of paper up to catch the faint light coming through the gaps in the boarded up window.

  She turned towards us as we entered the room and with a few quiet words I explained the situation. Her eyes widened as much as mine no doubt had before she looked at Cass and opened her mouth to speak but no words seemed ready to come out.

  “This will be the first baby born to our community,” I said. “We need things to go smoothly for Cass and her child, so what will you need?”

  “Need? I don’t know,” Gabby said. “I’ve helped with birthing some of the animals on local farms but this is… well, it’s totally different.”

  “Can you at least tell how far along she is?” I asked. “Maybe give us an idea of when the child will be born.”

  “When was your last period?” Gabby asked Cass.

  “Five weeks ago.”

  “Have you taken a test?”

  “Yeah,” she said with a faint blush rising to her cheeks. “We have a few testing kits in the inventory.”

  “Okay,” Gabby said as she tapped thoughtfully on her lower lip. “Five weeks ago would be December twenty sixth, right?”

  “As near as we can guess these days,” I agreed.

  “Right, so add approximately thirty eight weeks and that gives us…” she reached for a pen and pad of papers and began scribbling down some numbers. “October the first.”

  “That’s going to present some problems, but nothing we can’t handle,” I said with perhaps more confidence than I felt.

  “Of course,” Gabby agreed. “I’ll start up a list of everything I can think of that we might need.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  As I turned to Cass I plastered a wide smile onto my face to try and show a great deal more confidence than I felt. The logistics of what would be needed were almost mind numbing. A pregnancy alone would require a better diet than we currently had and that was without any medical needs.

  “It’ll be fine,” I told her. “Now, perhaps you should go and have a word with Pat while I start gathering lists of things we’re going to need.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should,” Cass said. “I hope he’ll take it well.”

  “Knowing Pat he’ll be over the moon and you might get more than a few words out of him when you tell him.”

  “Aye maybe,” she said with a laugh.

  I said farewell to my friends and made as quick an exit as I could without leaving them questioning why. A baby! Of all the things that we had to deal with, that was the one I’d feared the most.

  It was hard enough surviving amidst the chaos of the apocalypse but the added worry of a new born baby… well it was almost more than I could cope with. It was all becoming too much, too many dangers for my people, too many worries. I honestly wasn’t sure what to do other than burst into tears and hide away from it all.

  “Help, help!”

  My head snapped around to the sound of the cry for help and I saw one of the older children, a boy of around fourteen burst through the doors. He saw me and skidded to a stop face red with exertion and panic plain on his face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s zombies on the island.”

  Chapter 5

  Ryan

  With one final cut I pulled free the heart of the zombie and dropped it to the table beside its head. It didn’t look especially impressed or concerned at seeing its own heart and continued to chew on the cloth covering its mouth.

  “That’s messed up,” Gregg said.

  “It’s pretty much impossible,” I muttered as I slammed my knife down.

  It didn’t seem to matter which internal organ was removed, the creature just kept moving. It had no need of lungs to breathe or heart to move the half congealed blood through its veins. The only thing it did seem to need was its brain.

  Remove that and it died for a final time. It was irritating beyond measure that I couldn’t figure out why or what was doing it.

  “So what now?” Jenny asked.

  “Dispose of it like the rest,” I said as with one smooth motion I picked up my knife and slammed it down through the pitiful creatures’ eye and into its brain.

  Something was animating the zombies and I wanted to know what that was, if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity. My search for the answer hadn’t been going well and all I’d done is determine how resilient they were.

  “We have another two shamblers’ down stairs in the cellar,” Gregg offered. “I could bring another one up.”

  “No I think we’ve done all we can with these ones,” I said.

  “What about the other?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s creepy as hell and I don’t like the way it watches me, like it understands,” Gregg said.

  My thoughts briefly travelled back to when we’d managed to catch it and how… energetic it had been. On subsequent visits it had lain still as though conserving its energy for when it was free. That was a display of intelligence that we were seeing more often from the slightly fresher looking zombies.

  “Did you check the wound?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Gregg said as he nodded emphatically. “Like you thought it started to close up. Slower than it would on a living person but still…”

  “It began healing,” I mused. “Something is separating the undead into two types. The shamblers that are stupid and slowly decaying, becoming less of a threat each day, unless they are in a large group.”

  “The others, though fewer in number but with an almost feral cunning and better agility and coordination than their brethren. They are going to become the problem.”

  “We’ve faced them before,” Gregg said.

  I admired his confidence but I had a niggling doubt that we were seeing evolution in progress. The slower zombies had grown their numbers as they culled the weaker humans from the herd. They were now insufficient for the task of rooting out the survivors so another, hardier and more intelligent species of undead was rising in their place.

  “Perhaps,” I said with a faint smile of what I hoped he’d take to be reassurance. It was hard to tell sometimes.

  “So, what do you want to do about the others downstairs? Can I come back to camp yet?”

  “Not quite yet I’m afraid,” I said as I pulled free my knife from the corpse on the table. “I have a theory I’d like to test with the zombie downstairs first.”

  “What theory?”

  I didn’t answer and instead just headed to the kitchen and the cellar door. The bite marks I’d seen on the zombies we’d killed earlier had been bothering me. Why would anyone take a bite from a zombie?

  My suspicions, if I were correct, would raise a number of quite interesting questions that may bring a little challenge back to my life. A challenge that I was desperately in need of to stave off the growing feeling of general dissatisfaction.

  Lily, for all her positive attributes, had an annoying habit of trying to bring civilization back to the world. I’d told her more than once that I couldn’t exist in any kind of society that arose from the ashes of the previous.

  I was a killer and a damned good one. People meant nothing to me other than the pleasure I could gain from ending their lives and while I could do that anonymously in a nation
of sixty million people, when those numbers were reduced to the hundreds or perhaps thousands… well, I wouldn’t be able to do what I did without being noticed.

  To stay with her I’d adhered to the rules she’d made and I’d kept myself entertained with the hordes of undead and occasional death of people when it wouldn’t break her rules. The problem was we hadn’t met many new people for a while and the zombies were becoming less of a challenge and killing them provided little real pleasure.

  Soon, much sooner than I hoped, I would need to kill someone. If that need went unanswered then my control would slip and something bad would happen. That would destroy my relationship with Lily and for some quite inexplicable reason, the thought of that brought some uncomfortable feelings to the fore.

  I shook the darker thoughts aside as I descended the stairs. The one eyed zombie was there where we’d left it, laid upon a sturdy table and bound tightly. I crossed the dirty cellar floor to stand beside it, the light from my torch illuminating the cut I’d made in its shoulder several days ago.

  Gregg was right, it was closing up. I glanced up to see it had turned its head and was staring right at me, its lone eye filled with hate. I couldn’t help but grin and for a moment I imagined that it realised I was mocking it.

  The other two zombies we’d managed to subdue were the brainless type whose only response to my presence was to thrash around as though they had a chance of reaching me, bound as they were. I studied them thoughtfully for a moment before coming to a decision.

  With swift strokes from my blade I severed the bonds holding the one eyed zombie to the table. It would take a few minutes to free itself from the blankets which gave me ample time to dash up the stairs and slam shut the door behind me.

  “What’s going on?” Gregg asked.

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said as I closed the heavy padlock with a solid click. “Best you don’t go down there again.”

  “Why?”

  “Just testing a theory but to do so meant I had to release the zombie,” I said with a grin at his look of shock. “As long as you keep the door locked you’ll be fine.”