by David Moody
‘Fraser calls out for help and I look around for him. He’s holding his weapon out in front of him and he’s moving towards this building. It looks like an office or something and I can see there are people trapped inside. They’re stood there banging on the glass, and it looks like it’s a real effort for them to move because they’re so sick. The door’s been blocked by a crashed motorbike, so me and Fraser shift it out the way. He throws the door of the building open and straightaway the people start pouring out. I only have to look at them for a second and I know they’re just like all the other poor bastards we’ve already seen. One of them walks straight into me and I look right into its face. There’s nothing there. I swear, not a single bloody flicker of emotion. Not a fucking sign of life. It’s not even breathing. And I realise, these bloody things are dead but they’re still fucking moving.
‘Sarge gets on the loudhailer. He’s shouting the usual crap at them about how we’ll help them if they cooperate and he’s trying to get them out of the buildings and into the market square. I turn around to look back at the others and fucking hell, there must have been a couple of hundred of the bloody things getting close to us already. They’re crowding round and they start reaching out and trying to grab hold of us when they get close enough. I’m thinking about my bloody suit again and I keep pushing them away but they keep coming back for more. Sarge fires a few warning shots into the air but it doesn’t make any difference. Next to me Fraser starts hitting one of them and the fucking thing doesn’t even notice. Every time he hits it he’s doing more and more damage but the damn thing just keeps coming. Its fucking face is falling to pieces but it just keeps on coming.
‘Every way I turn now I can see more and more of them. We’re looking at Sarge for some frigging inspiration and he’s just looking back at us, scared as we are. I lose sight of him when a couple of them rush me. I lose my footing and before I know it I’m on the ground with them on top of me. There’s no weight to them. All I keep thinking is be careful of the fucking suit, make sure you don’t get cut. I’m punching and kicking out but the bloody things just don’t give up. I manage to get back up and I can see we’re surrounded. And there are more of them coming out of the shadows all the bloody time. I see Wheeler heading back to the transport and I can see the driver’s already back in her seat getting ready to leave, and I’m thinking fuck orders, I’ve gotta get out of here, and I start fighting my way through the crowd.
‘Fraser’s the last one back in. He tries to shut the door behind him but gets caught by one of them that manages to grab his leg as he climbs up. I’m watching and I can’t look away and I’m thinking this can’t be happening. It’s a kid, probably not even fifteen, and its body is so light and empty that it’s hanging off him and Fraser’s just dragging it along. It’s got hold of his boot somehow and he’s using the butt of the rifle to smash its hand away. He pushes it off and tries to get it back out the door. Wheeler leans out and pulls the door shut but the bloody thing hasn’t gone. Its head and shoulders are wedged in and Wheeler’s banging and pulling at the door, trying to get rid of it. The kid’s got one arm inside the transport and it’s still trying to get at Fraser and he’s just standing there. He lifts up his rifle and blows a fucking hole in the middle of its face, then kicks what’s left of the body out onto the street.’
Kilgore rubbed his eyes and looked up into the light, then let his head fall. ‘And that, mate,’ he said, struggling to light a cigarette with shaking hands, ‘is just about all that you, me and everyone else who’s stuck in this fucking hole has got to look forward to. We either spend the rest of our time buried here, or we end up stuck out in that bloody mess up top, shrink-wrapped in our fucking plastic suits until whatever it is that’s done all this finally catches up with us.’
HOME
Steninger is less than two hours from home. He hasn’t been this close for almost a month. He hasn’t been this close since it happened. Twenty-three days ago millions of people died as the world fell apart around him.
#
I’ve been here hundreds of times before but it’s never looked like this. Georgie and I used to drive up here at weekends to walk the dog over the hills. We’d let him off the lead and then walk and talk and watch him play for hours. That was long before the events which have since kept us apart. It all feels like a lifetime ago now. Today the green, rolling landscape I remember is washed out and grey and everything is lifeless and dead. The world is decaying around me. It’s early in the morning, perhaps an hour before sunrise, and there’s a layer of light mist clinging to the ground. I’m alone, but I’m surrounded. I can see them moving all around. They’re everywhere. Shuffling. Staggering. Hundreds of the damn things.
One last push and I’ll be home. I’m starting to get nervous now. For days I’ve struggled to get here but, now I’m this close, I don’t know if I can go through with it. Seeing what’s left of Georgie and our home will hurt. It’s been so long and so much has happened since we were last together. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to walk through the front door. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stand the pain of remembering everything that’s gone and all that I’ve lost.
I’m as scared now as I was when this nightmare began. I remember it as if it was only minutes ago, not weeks. I was in a breakfast meeting with my lawyer and one of his staff when it started. Jarvis was explaining some legal jargon to me when he stopped talking mid-sentence. I asked him what was wrong but he couldn’t answer. His breathing became shallow and short and he started to splutter. He was choking but I couldn’t see why and I was concentrating so hard on what was happening to him that I didn’t notice it had got the other man too. As Jarvis’ face paled and he began to scratch and claw at his throat his colleague lurched forward and tried to grab hold of me. Eyes bulging, he retched and showered me with blood and spittle. I recoiled and pushed my chair back away from the table, then stood with my back pressed against the wall and watched the two men choke to death. Seconds later, the room was silent.
When I eventually plucked up the courage to get out and look for help I found the receptionist who had greeted me less than an hour earlier lying in a pool of red-brown blood. The security man on the door was dead too, as was everyone else I could see. It was the same when I finally dared step out into the open – an endless layer of twisted human remains covered the ground in every direction I looked. What had happened was inexplicable and its scale incomprehensible. In the space of just a few minutes something – a germ, virus or biological attack perhaps – had destroyed my world. Nothing moved. The silence was deafening.
At first I’d instinctively wanted stay where I was, to keep my head down and wait for something – anything – to happen. I walked back to the hotel as it was the only nearby place I knew well, picking my way through the bodies, staring at each of them in turn, looking deep into their grotesque, twisted faces. Each of them bore an expression of sudden, searing agony.
When I got back, the hotel was as silent and cold as everywhere else. I locked myself in my room and waited there for hours until the unending solitude became too much to stand. I needed explanations but there was no one left alive to ask. The television was useless, as was the radio, and the telephone went unanswered. Even the Internet seemed to have died, frozen in time. Increasingly desperate, I packed my few belongings and made a break for home. But I soon found that the hushed roads were impassable, blocked by the tangled wreckage of incalculable numbers of crashed vehicles and the mangled, bloody remains of their dead drivers and passengers. With my wife and my home still more than eighty miles away I stopped the car and gave up.
It was early on the first Thursday, the third day, when the situation deteriorated again to the point where I began to question my sanity. I had been resting in the front bedroom of an empty terraced house when I looked out of the window and saw the first one of them staggering down the road. All the fear and nervousness I had previously felt was immediately forgotten as I watched the lone figure walk a
wkwardly down the street. It was another survivor, I thought, it had to be. Someone who, at last, might be able to tell me what had happened and who could answer some of the thousands of impossible questions I desperately needed to ask. I yelled out and banged on the window but the person outside didn’t respond. I sprinted out of the house and ran down the road, then grabbed hold of their arm and turned them around. As unbelievable as it seemed at the time, I knew instantly that the thing in front of me was dead. Its eyes were clouded, covered with a milky-white film, and its skin was pock-marked and bloodied. And it was cold to the touch… I held its left wrist in my hand and felt for a pulse but found nothing. The creature’s skin felt unnaturally clammy and leathery and I let it go in disgust. The moment I released my grip the damn thing shuffled slowly away like it didn’t even know I was there.
Out of the corner of my eye I became aware of more movement. I turned and saw another body, then another and then another. I walked to the end of the street and stared in disbelief at what was happening all around me. The dead were rising. Many were already moving around on clumsy, unsteady feet, whilst still more were slowly dragging themselves back up from where they’d fallen and died days earlier.
A frantic search for food and water and somewhere safe to shelter led me back deeper into town. Avoiding the mannequin-like bodies, I barricaded myself in a large pub on a corner where two once busy roads met. I cleared eight corpses out of the building (I herded them all into the bar before forcing them out the front door) and then locked myself in an upstairs function room where I started to drink. Although it didn’t make me drunk like it used to, the alcohol took the very slightest edge off my fear.
I thought constantly about Georgie and home but I was too afraid to move. I knew I should try to get to her but for days I just sat there, hiding like a coward. Every morning I tried to make myself leave but the thought of going back out into what remained of the world was unbearable. Instead I sat in booze-fueled isolation and watched the world decay.
As the days passed, the bodies themselves changed. Initially stiff and staccato, their movements gradually became more purposeful and controlled. After four days I observed that their senses were beginning to return. They were starting to respond to what was happening around them. Late one afternoon in a moment of frightened frustration, I hurled an empty beer bottle across the room. I missed the wall and smashed a window. Out of curiosity I looked down into the street below and saw that huge numbers of the corpses were now walking towards the pub. Attracted by the noise (which seemed louder than it actually was in the otherwise all-consuming silence) they moved relentlessly closer and closer. During the hours which followed I tried to keep quiet and out of sight but my every movement seemed to make more of them aware of my presence. From every direction they came and all I could do was watch as a crowd of hundreds of the damn things surrounded me. They followed each other like herding animals and soon their lumbering, decomposing shapes filled the streets outside for as far as I could see.
A week went by, and the ferocity of the creatures increased. They began to fight with each other and they fought to get to me. They clawed and banged at the doors but didn’t yet have the strength to get inside. My options were hopelessly limited but I knew I had to do something. I could stay where I was and drink enough so that I didn’t care when the bodies eventually broke through, or I could make a break for freedom and take my chances outside. I had nothing to lose. I thought about home and I thought about Georgie and I knew that I had to try and get back to her.
It wasn’t much of a plan but it was all I had. I packed the meagre supplies and provisions I found lying around the pub into a rucksack and got myself ready to leave. I made crates of crude bombs from the liquor bottles behind the bar and those in the cellar and storeroom. As the light began to fade at the end of the tenth day I hung out of the broken window at the front of the building, lit the booze-soaked rag fuses which I had stuffed down the necks of the bottles, and then began to hurl them down into the rotting crowds below. In minutes I’d created more chaotic devastation than I imagined possible. There had been little rain for days. Tinder dry and packed tight together, the repugnant bodies caught light almost instantly. Oblivious to the flames which steadily consumed them, the damn things continued to move about for as long as they were physically able, their every staggering step spreading the fire still further and destroying more and more of them. And the dancing orange light and the crackling and popping of burning flesh drew even more of the desperate cadavers closer to the scene.
I crept downstairs and waited by the back door. The building itself was soon alight. Doubled-up with hunger pains (the world outside had unexpectedly filled with the smell of roast meat like a summer hog roast) I crouched in the shadows and waited until the rising temperature in the building was too much to stand. When the flames began to lick at the door to the room I hid in, I pushed my way out into the night and ran through the bodies. Their reactions were dull and slow and my relative speed and strength and the surprise of my sudden appearance meant they offered virtually no resistance. In the silent, monochrome world, the confusion that I’d generated provided enough of a distraction to camouflage my movements and render me temporarily invisible.
#
Since I’ve been on the move I’ve learnt to live like a shadow. My difficult journey home has been painfully long and slow. I move only at night under cover of darkness. If the bodies see or hear me they will come for me and, as I’ve found to my cost on more than one occasion, once one of them has my scent then countless others will follow. I have avoided them as much as possible but their numbers are vast and some contact has been inevitable. I’m getting better at dealing with them. The initial disgust and trepidation I felt has now given way to hate and anger. Through necessity I have become a cold and effective killer, although I’m not sure whether that’s an accurate description of my new found skill. I have to keep reminding myself that these bloody aberrations are already dead.
Apart from the mass of bodies I managed to obliterate during my escape from the pub, the first corpse I intentionally disposed of had once been a priest. I came across the emaciated creature when I took shelter at dawn one morning in a small village church. It had appeared empty at first until I pushed my way into a narrow storeroom at the far end of the grey-stone building. I was immediately aware of shuffling movement ahead of me. A small window high on the wall to my left let a limited amount of light spill into the storeroom and allowed me to see the outline of the body of the priest as it came at me. The cadaver was weak, barely coordinated, and I instinctively grabbed hold of it by the neck then threw it back across the room. It smashed into a bookshelf and was buried by falling prayer books. Constantly thrashing its leaden arms and legs, it eventually pulled itself back up onto its dead feet. I stared into its vacant, hollowed face as it dragged itself back into the light. The first body I had seen up close for several days, it was a damn mess. Just a shadow of the man it had once been, the creature’s skin appeared taut and translucent and it had an unnatural green-grey hue. Its cheeks and eye sockets were sunken and its mouth and chin speckled with dribbles of dried blood. Its black shirt and dog-collar hung loose around its scrawny neck.
For a moment I was distracted by the thing’s sickening appearance and it caught me by surprise when it charged at me again. I was knocked off-balance but I managed to grab hold of it by the throat. I straightened my arm to keep it at a safe distance, then used my free hand to feel around for something to use as a weapon. My outstretched fingers found the stem of an ornate candleholder behind me and to my right. I gripped it tight, then lifted it high above my head and brought the base of it crashing down on the dead priest’s skull. Stunned but undeterred, the body tripped back, then came at me again. I lifted the candleholder and smashed it down again and again until the head of the corpse was little more than a pulp of blood, brain and bone. I stood over the cleric’s twitching remains until it finally lay still.
I hid in th
e bell tower of the church and waited for the night to come.
#
It didn’t take long to work out the rules.
Although they have become increasingly violent as time has gone on, the creatures remain predictable. I think that they are driven purely by instinct. What remains of their brains seem to operate on a basic, primitive level and each one is little more than a fading memory of what it used to be. I quickly learnt that this reality is nothing like the trash horror movies I used to watch or the books I used to read. These things don’t want to kill me so that they can feast on my flesh. In fact I don’t actually think they have any physical needs or desires – they don’t eat, drink, sleep or even breathe as far as I can see. So why do they attack? It’s a paradox but the longer I think about it, the more convinced I am that they see me as a threat. I’m different and I’m stronger and I think they know that I could easily destroy them. I think they try to attack me before I have chance to attack them.
Over the last few days and weeks I have watched them steadily disintegrate and decay. And therein lies another bizarre irony: as their bodies have continued to weaken and become more fragile, so their mental control seems to have returned. They have an innate sense of self-preservation and will respond violently to any perceived threat. Sometimes they fight amongst themselves and I have hidden in the darkness and watched them set about each other until almost all of their rotten flesh has been stripped from their bones and they can barely stand.
I know beyond doubt now that the brain remains the centre of control. My second, third and fourth kills confirmed that. I had broken into an isolated house in search of food and fresh clothes, when I found myself face to face with the rotting remains of what appeared to have once been a fairly typical family. I quickly disposed of the father with a short wooden fence post I had been carrying as a makeshift weapon. I smacked the repulsive creature around the side of the head again and again until it had almost been decapitated. The next body – the dead man’s dead wife, I presumed – had proved to be more troublesome. I entered a large, square dining room and the body of the woman came at me with unexpected speed. I held the picket out in front of me and skewered the damn thing through the chest. Its withered torso and parchment skin offered next to no resistance and the wood plunged deep into its abdomen and straight out the other side. I retched and struggled to keep control of my stomach as the remains of its putrefied organs slid out of the hole I had made in its back and slopped down onto the cream-coloured carpet in a slimy crimson heap. I pushed the body away, expecting it to collapse like the last one had, but it didn’t. Instead it staggered after me, still impaled and struggling to move as I had clearly caused a massive amount of damage to its spine with the fence picket. I panicked. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the largest knife I could find before returning to the body. It had managed to take a few more steps forward but stopped immediately when I plunged the blade through its right eye into the core of what remained of its brain. It was as if someone had flicked a switch. The dead woman slumped down and slid off the knife and dropped at my feet like a bloodied rag-doll. In the silence which followed I could hear the third body thumping around upstairs. To prove my theory I ran up the stairs and disposed of a dead teenager in the same way as its mother with a single stab to the head.