The Undead the Second Week Compilation Edition Days 8-14

by RR Haywood

  ‘No this is fine, thank you,’ her manner is instantly different, her tone less defensive now she’s holding a decent weapon. Nick comes back through the swing doors, the axe wedged under his arm as he stuffs bags of crisps and peanuts into his bag.

  ‘I got some and water too...oh…’ he comes up short as Lani turns to him holding the shotgun down at her side.

  ‘I gave it to her Nick.’

  ‘Fair enough, do you need some shells? I’ve got loads,’ he drops the bag and starts rummaging about before pulling out a handful of shotgun cartridges, ‘do you know how to load it?’ Nick asks as she takes the cartridges and starts stuffing them into the pockets of her jeans. I watch for a few seconds as Nick shows her how to break the weapon and re-load cartridges into the breach. She nods as the friendly lad chats amiably, the tension slowly easing away.

  ‘Everything alright Mr Howie?’ Dave asks, silently stepping through the door behind me.

  ‘Fine mate, Lani this is Dave, Dave this is Lani.’

  ‘Nice to meet you Miss,’ Dave nods as though it’s the most normal thing in the world to see a woman holding a shotgun in a bowling alley in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

  ‘Is she coming with us?’ He asks in his usual blunt manner.

  ‘I’ve offered mate, Lani? We could do with the local knowledge and you’ll be safer with us than here on your own.’

  ‘Yeah right, after all the scraps we’ve had already,’ Nick laughs then cuts himself off, ‘sorry I didn’t mean it like that,’ he adds to the young woman, ‘just stand next to him and nothing will touch you,’ he nods at Dave who just stares without expression, ‘or the big bloke with the bald head, actually if you stand between them then you’ll probably be the safest person in the entire world.’ He gabbles on as she looks at him with a puzzled expression.

  ‘Did you get any food?’ Blowers asks as he and Cookey step into the foyer behind Dave.

  ‘Why are we all here?’ I turn to ask them.

  ‘That thing is going soooo slowly Mr Howie, Clarence said he’d stay with him and we’re starving, oh hello,’ Blowers stops as he sees Lani and I notice Cookey gives her a big smile.

  ‘Lani this is Blowers and Cookey, she was in here when we came in.’

  ‘Nice meat cleaver,’ Cookey smiles.

  ‘Here,’ Nick throws a bag of crisps at Cookey’s head causing him to jump back laughing.

  ‘Ah nice one mate,’ Cookey exclaims. Nick throws another one to Blowers who rips the bag open and starts eating quickly.

  ‘Is that your shotgun Mr Howie?’ Blowers asks with a mouthful of food.

  ‘Yes mate, she only had the meat cleaver.’

  ‘Fair one, you’ll need it,’ Blowers says to her, ‘there’s shit loads of them up there,’ he nods back along the way we just came.

  ‘You coming with us?’ Cookey swallows a mouthful of crisps and asks the question before stuffing another handful in his mouth.

  ‘I…er…’ she seems overwhelmed at the sight of the men suddenly in her safe place, armed to the teeth and dressed in half military gear.

  ‘I’ve offered,’ I explain.

  ‘You should come with us,’ Blowers says, ‘it’ll be nice to have someone other than this knob to talk to.’ He adds as Cookey splutters with indignation. The two lads step forward and grab more crisps from Nick’s bag, Cookey offers one to Lani who declines politely. Within a couple of seconds the three lads are standing round her, chatting amiably as they munch food. Their relaxed banter putting her visibly at ease.

  ‘We’d better join Clarence before this lot eat all the food, Lani? We’d be more than happy to have you with us.’

  ‘If that’s okay,’ she nods smiling for the first time.

  ‘Of course, do you need to get anything?’

  ‘Just my bag, it’s in the kitchen,’ she starts walking back through the swing doors.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Nick and the other two start going after her, ‘I’ll go,’ Nick says to Blowers and Cookey.

  ‘No mate, you’ve done plenty of running about, just relax,’ Blowers says as Cookey speeds up to go past them both. The three of them jostle through the doors following the pretty girl as I shake my head at Dave.

  ‘Well she’s got a bodyguard now,’ I mutter.

  ‘Yes Mr Howie.’

  ‘So you and Clarence okay now?’

  ‘Yes Mr Howie, sorry about that.’

  ‘You don’t have to apologise Dave.’

  ‘Won’t happen again,’ he adds.

  ‘It might do, just as long as we know why we’re here and what we’ve got to do, we can all fall out as much as we like. In fact it’s bound to happen but the end goal is the most important thing.’ He stares at me keenly, ‘What?’ I ask him.

  ‘Nothing Mr Howie,’ he says flatly but holds that gaze for another second before looking away with a very small wry smile.

  ‘Are you smiling?’ I ask him, shocked at the highly unusual expression.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it Sir.’

  ‘Don’t start with the Sir stuff, what were you smiling about.’

  ‘Just what you said, you sound like a proper officer now Mr Howie.’

  ‘I’m not an officer Dave, I’m a supermarket manager.’

  ‘You were a supermarket manager and you’re right you’re not an officer,’ he accepts then looks back at me with that same keen look, ‘you’re a leader now and that’s what officers were meant to do; lead.’

  ‘Ah piss of Dave, fuck me mate we worked in the same supermarket.’ I feel uncomfortable at the comments he makes.

  ‘Different world Mr Howie, there’s only here and now.’ Thankfully we’re interrupted by the return of the others coming through the swing doors and I notice Lani has a small brightly coloured rucksack on her back, too small for the shotgun to rest in so she holds it in one hand with the meat cleaver in the other.

  ‘Dave, I found these…any good?’ Blowers crouches down and rolls out a chef’s knife holder full of black handled deadly looking knives. Dave is on them instantly, drawing each one out and checking the length of the blade, the sharpness, the balance and the weight. He discards most of them but leaves two long straight bladed knives similar to the ones I’ve seen him use so many times.

  ‘These two are good, well done Blowers,’ Dave stuffs the roll into his bag before standing up and nodding at the now grinning and proud looking lad.

  I head out the double doors back into the early morning air and start walking quickly towards Clarence who is still strolling slowly behind the limping zombie. I notice he keeps his eyes up, sweeping round every few seconds. He looks over at us and the new girl walking with us, smiling at her as we get closer.

  ‘Lani this is Clarence,’ I make the introduction quietly, still trying to avoid alerting the undead that we’re behind him. He’s well enough ahead and still shuffling along quite happily.

  ‘Hi, you were in there?’ Clarence rumbles quietly.

  ‘Yeah,’ she looks in awe at the giant man.

  ‘You been in there since it happened?’ We settle into a gentle walk, keeping a safe distance behind, each one of us sweeping round for a full view every few seconds.

  ‘I was working in the nightclub upstairs, so is this everywhere then?’

  ‘Yep, I watched it on television when it started in Europe and that fell in a few hours. We’ve been all over the south coast. London’s gone, no government, no police or army, nothing.’

  ‘I kept thinking help would come, but it just went on and on. I saw those people come on the boats and I was going to go out but I…I got scared and didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘So why confront us then?’ I ask her.

  ‘I don’t know, I thought you were those things,’ she shrugs as the group listen to her speaking. ‘I thought they were all slow in the daytime, I’ve already killed a few…’ her voice remains strong yet quiet as she speaks. ‘Why are we following him?’ She motions with the meat cleaver towards the undead
trying to negotiate a high kerb. His broken leg won’t lift high enough and keeps dragging him back. We stop walking for a few minutes and watch with growing frustration as he makes attempt after attempt but keeps dropping back down into the road.

  ‘I’ll go and kick him up the arse in a minute,’ Blowers mutters.

  ‘Tut tut, anything to touch an arse eh Blowers?’ Cookey says quickly.

  ‘I’m not rising to it Cookey.’

  ‘I bet you do for him though,’ Cookey says nodding towards the zombie as Nick sniggers.

  ‘Yay….oh no…’ Nick sighs as the zombie gets onto the kerb and balances for a few seconds before toppling back down again.

  ‘They’re gaining,’ We turn as Dave looks back down the way we came at the mass of undead slowly shuffling into view past the now blazing buildings spreading along the road.

  ‘Shouldn’t we hide?’ Lani asks in a quiet voice.

  ‘We need to follow that thing to find out where Darren is,’ Clarence replies staring back down the road.

  ‘Darren?’ Lani asks clearly confused. Blowers starts recounting the story from when they were at Salisbury barracks and were found by Dave and I. Nick and Cookey join in eagerly bragging about the exploits, journeys and battles we’ve had. They go quieter and more serious as they explain about how Darren got turned, how we lost McKinney and through to the final battle when we lost Tucker, Curtis and finally Jamie. Lani stays quiet throughout the whole explanation, looking to each of them in turn as they all join in with different parts. She nods and asks quick questions to clarify points and just during that short time I can see she’s an intelligent person and quick to smile as the lad’s infectious humour catches onto her. At the end she looks downcast and saddened, looking at them earnestly and I see both Nick and Cookey looking away as their eyes fill with tears and they swallow the sudden lumps in their throats.

  ‘What about you?’ Blowers asks, giving the other two a chance to recover for a minute. She smiles sadly as we start walking again, the zombie eventually making it up the kerb and continuing his painfully slow shuffle.

  ‘I was working in the nightclub upstairs; I had to come down to get some change from the office in the bowling alley. It took me a few minutes to do the alarm and get into the safe. When I got back up….it was just a mess…I thought it was just a massive fight at first but then I saw the blood and injuries, the biting and people on the floor bleeding. I ran back down and called the police but they wouldn’t answer. I kept trying and trying but I couldn’t get through. After a while I went back up and peeked through the door but it was even worse. I stayed downstairs after that. I could see things happening through the windows, fighting and people getting dragged onto the floor….people I knew too…I just hid there all night and most of the next day. My phone ran out of battery because I tried calling everyone but couldn’t get through.’

  ‘Have you been there the whole time?’ I ask gently, she doesn’t show any emotion as she speaks and reminds me of Dave the way she keeps her face expressionless.

  ‘No, I stayed for a few days then one day I got out and went home, I don’t live that far away. I kept seeing groups of those things standing about and stayed away from them, I got home but my street was full of them...so I went to other people’s houses, people I knew but they were either turned into those things or just gone. I hid that night and then came back here the next day. When I got back the doors had been kicked in so I figured somebody had been in. That’s why I didn’t fix them, I didn’t want anyone to know someone was in there,’ she looks at me as she explains that bit.

  ‘Makes sense,’ I nod.

  ‘That’s it really.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘No, they were in the street when I went home. They’d been bitten or whatever.’

  ‘That’s awful, I’m so sorry Lani,’ I say gently, the others add comforting words too but she remains as deadpan as before.

  ‘Mum, Dad’ she shrugs, ‘my little brother,’ she nods as though explaining something entirely normal.

  ‘Bloody hell mate, I don’t know what to say,’ I shake my head and look down at the floor, there are no words to say to someone after seeing that.

  ‘Nothing really too say, everyone has suffered.’

  ‘True, you’ve done well by the sounds of it,’ she smiles at me.

  ‘Very well,’ Clarence adds with a nod at the small woman, ‘so you’ve had contact then?’

  ‘Contact?’ She asks.

  ‘With them, you said you’d killed a few,’ he explains.

  ‘At my friends flat, I knew he had a key hidden so I let myself in but he was already inside. He must have got bitten and got home before he turned. I stabbed him in the face, and then some more were in the corridor when I went back out.’ She keeps the same flat tone, either masking her emotions extremely well or is like Dave and it simply doesn’t bother her. But then she showed empathy when the lads explained about our losses which is something Dave isn’t able to do.

  ‘Have you seen any other survivors?’ I ask.

  ‘No, none…other than the people getting off the boats but they didn’t hang around. There were two older men leading them, one had a white beard.’

  ‘The bloke with the beard was the navy captain, the other one was Ted, he was probably dressed like a policeman,’ I explain.

  ‘I couldn’t see clearly but he was dressed in black and looked like he had a gun.’

  ‘Yeah that was Ted. So any idea’s where they could have gone? Where does this direction lead?’

  ‘If you find Darren will you kill him?’ She asks quickly and gets a chorus of emphatic responses from all of us.

  ‘If you keep going along there’s the esplanade and the boating lake, then it goes to a long forest area until it gets to the next village but that’s a few miles away.’

  ‘What’s in between?’ Dave asks.

  ‘Couple of café’s, an old tower on the beach…’

  ‘Old tower?’ Dave interrupts.

  ‘It’s really small; you couldn’t fit more than a few people inside.’

  ‘Okay, keep going,’ Dave prompts her.

  ‘The forest area, but that’s got a big open space in the middle and it’s not that big really, then there’s Puckpool…wait,’ she stops mid-stride thinking for a second, ‘Puckpool is an old fort too,’ she adds quickly.

  ‘A fort?’ I ask as we all stop to watch her intently.

  ‘Yeah, it’s really old, like well over a hundred years or something. There’s a café and tennis court, car park but one side is really high, it’s all overgrown now but there’s bunkers and like underground tunnels.’

  ‘It’s worth a look, how far is it?’

  ‘Couple of hours walk,’ she stares back at me.

  ‘Right, we can’t risk leading Darren to it so we have to sort him out first, agreed?’ They all nod back at me apart from Lani who bites her bottom lip again.

  ‘Or we send a scout forward,’ Dave says, ‘I could go for this place Lani said.’

  ‘We won’t know where to meet, we could get separated or anything could happen, I think we should stick together.’ The thought of losing Dave is almost unbearable.

  ‘I’ll find you,’ Dave says confident and matter of fact.

  ‘I don’t like the idea mate.’

  ‘How about,’ Clarence cuts in, ‘we go for the new place and Dave holds back to see if Darren trails us.’

  ‘That tower is about halfway,’ Lani says, ‘it’s a good meeting place.’

  ‘Dave?’ I look at the small serious man, he nods back in agreement. I still don’t like the idea but it makes sense. We can make pace to find our group knowing our rear is covered by the most dangerous man any of us, including Clarence, has ever known. For a second I wonder if the pressure ever gets to him, if Dave ever suffers self-doubt or insecurity instead of the mammoth sense of confidence he oozes from every pore in his body.

  ‘You won’t see me, but I’ll be nearby,’ Dave shrugs off his ru
cksack and hands it to a puzzled Lani to hold. He pulls out a bottle of water and takes a long drink, downing the bottle in one long gulp, ‘Lani, you take my bag, Mr Howie take my shotgun.’ He hands the weapon over and checks his pistol and the two knives tucked into the back of his trousers. ‘Tell me the route you’re taking?’ He asks Lani.

  ‘Er, we’ll keep to the beach…that’s it really.’

  ‘No deviations anywhere?’ Dave asks.

  ‘No,’ she replies confidently.

  ‘Okay, no matter what happens do not come back for me,’ Dave says firmly then looks directly at Clarence, ‘do not let them come back for me, wait at the tower for a while and make it so you are clearly seen going there, stay visible. Wait a few hours but if I don’t come then find shelter for the night, I’ll find you.’

  ‘Got it,’ Clarence nods.

  ‘Go straight to the beach and start walking, keep the pace steady and give him time to come after you.’ He nods at the lads, at Clarence and finally fixes his eyes on me.

  ‘Mr Howie,’ he nods and is gone, racing low across the road leaping over a garden wall and dropping down the other side. No noise, no crunching footsteps, just an empty void that we all feel.

  ‘Fuck me, I almost feel sorry for Darren,’ I mutter to break the silence, ‘would you want Dave coming after you?’

  ‘You’d lose,’ Clarence says quietly staring at the point on the wall where Dave disappeared.

  ‘He doesn’t look much,’ Lani says to shocked stares from the rest of us, but then he doesn’t look much. A small quiet man and out of all of us he looks the least threatening.

  ‘Looks are very deceiving, let’s move out.’

  Two

  ‘See I told you it was a good place,’ Marcy purrs as I look down from the window at the top of the four story building. She led me and my babies down the road as daylight started to hit, taking us through deserted back streets until we reached the back of one of the huge houses over-looking the esplanade and seafront. As I raced behind my raven haired zombie beauty I felt for the connection to my lovelies and knew they were with me. As the daylight hit they started to slow down but the control I have through my mind urged them to keep going and they responded with their staggering gait. That fucking Howie and his bunch of creepy weirdo’s aren’t the only ones that can move fast during the day.