The One Percent (Episode 2): The One Percent

by Heller, Erik P.

  “We need to go,” I said. The Groaners were no more than twenty feet away.

  I didn’t think we were in any fit shape between the three of us to take on that many.

  “We need to go,” I said loudly. I could hear the Groaners now. Moaning and shuffling along. Their clothes all looked relatively clean but all of them had bloody stains somewhere on them. They seemed uncoordinated but still had the appearance of working as a group, almost as if there was some kind of hive intelligence thing going on, but I wasn’t convinced. All I could see were seven individuals, who had all been attracted by the noises we had made and were all intent on one thing and one thing alone. With a jolt, I realised that one thing was us.

  I ran straight to where David was holding onto a crying Lucy, and with a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I grabbed hold of David’s arm, and stood him up. He turned to protest but I could see he had spotted the closing horde and said nothing.

  I grabbed Lucy and dragged her to her feet. She seemed completely out of it, her chin hanging down to her chest, sobs racking her slim body, shaking her shoulders.

  David was a gibbering wreck by then as the Groaners approached, hands held out, grubby, clawed, reaching out for us.

  I slung Lucy over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift, pushed David into a run and sprinted as hard as I could. Lucy’s gun was left behind.

  As we passed the dog, I took a chance, and yelled “Mungo, come,” at it. It worked. He scarpered after us as we ran across the line of Groaners, around the run of buildings the shop was in, fortunately clear of any stinking undead bodies, right around until we came out at the far end near the door into the shop. I was panting, sweating, my throat rasping, and legs burning from carrying Lucy who weighed more than I thought.

  It was only when we got to the corner that I realised she was pounding on my back with her fists, yelling at me to put her down. I set her down in front of me and even though she looked at me with burning eyes, like I’d done something wrong, I put a finger in front of my lips to tell her to stay quiet, and stepped past her trembling figure.

  I peeked around the corner. Six of the Groaners hadn’t followed. They were chowing down on the rancid flesh of that bastard Jamie. I had no clue where the other one was until I heard a noise from behind me and Mungo growling.

  The thing was just coming around the far corner of the building and as soon as it saw us there, it lunged at us, speeding up to something like a fast walk.

  David was transfixed. Lucy was leaning on the wall, still sobbing her heart out.

  I ran past them both, stepped as close as I dare and shot it straight in the face. Its momentum carried its collapsing body forwards and it fell, sliding to a stop just short of my feet. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned back. None of the others had moved, obviously concentrating on feeding despite the noise of the shot.

  I slowly crept around until I reached the shutter and as quietly as I could, worked the handle I retrieved from the bush to slide it up, so we could duck under it, and into the shop. I had to go back to fetch the others. Neither had moved, so I dragged them both into putting one foot in front of the other and pushed them under the shutter and through into the shop.

  Mungo darted in and I followed, after winding the shutter as far down as I could while leaving me space to slide under it, then shutting the door and locking it behind me. Not perfect I knew, but it would make things difficult for any Groaners to get in.

  As soon as I’d done that, I slid down with my back to the door, heaving deep breaths into my body to try to get some oxygen into my depleted system.

  IX0X0X0X0X0X0XI

  The rest of the day was rough. We decamped back upstairs and tried to sort through the pile of food we had. A lot of the tinned stuff was useless to us as nobody had thought to bring a can opener, and the knives we had were too flimsy to open them, so I packed them into our three packs, so we shared the weight. We’d found some pasta and rice, but we had no saucepan to boil either up in, so I packed those.

  The big bag of porridge would have been good, but we had nothing to cook it in.

  All in all, the scavenging trip had been less than a roaring success.

  In the end we had to satisfy ourselves with two tins of hot dog sausages which I warmed through in the tins, after peeling the ring pull lids off, a tin of tuna which Mungo got very excited about, and three tins of mixed fruits.

  I opened a tin of tuna for the dog and we each donated a frankfurter to make up a not completely balanced meal for any of us. It was enough to stop the hunger pangs though.

  We did manage to find three mugs in the lunch room of the offices, and if we’d bothered checking properly, teabags too. There was also one of those large watercoolers in there, and although the water wasn’t cold anymore, it was preferable to the water out of the taps in that house.

  Nobody seemed to be in any great hurry to move out, including me. The shock of what we had seen was still working its way through, and although she tried to hold up as best she could, I could see watery tears in Lucy’s eyes whenever she looked at me. The anger she’d had in them earlier was gone now.

  It took an age, but the camping stove eventually started the kettle whistling and I made three mugs of tea and handed them around.

  The silence in the room was hard to bear.

  Occasionally, while I sat on the windowsill watching out of the window, only moving when a Groaner passed by the gate, I heard Lucy crying softly.

  I didn’t think it was my place to intrude, so I left the delivery of comforting words and being a reassuring presence to David. He didn’t seem to be doing too good a job of it if her continued crying was anything to go by.

  I thought I probably had a reasonable idea of what she was going through. Guilt. Anger. More guilt. I just didn’t want her to be pressured into talking about what she had done.

  I didn’t blame her at all. She did what she thought was right, and there was no doubt that Jamie was a dangerous person, but I knew it was a tough thing to do, even if my own experience had been more in defence than revenge.

  After a couple of hours, the Groaners who had fallen like a pack of rabid dogs on Jamie’s dead body had eaten their fill, and I watched as they staggered away, pot-bellied, around the back of the houses. I figured maybe there was another way out of the small estate that way, but they could just have gone for a post-frenzied-feeding nap around the back. I still had the keys in my pocket and was eyeing up the garage attached to the side of Jamie’s house when Mungo came over and jumped up onto the office chair beside me, his weight and momentum making the chair swivel when he got onto it. It only turned once before I reached out my hand to touch the arm, making it stop before he got dizzy.

  I noticed he cowered away from my hand and let out a frightened growl. I hadn’t had much of a chance to look at him properly until then. He seemed to be painfully thin, and he had polished off the food we had given him in a flash, and although his eyes were bright, he seemed to be wary, which I wasn’t surprised at, given we had killed his master.

  I held my hand out again, slowly this time, and with the back of my hand towards him. He cowered again but I kept my hand there and spoke softly to him. After a few moments, he pushed forward his snout and sniffed my hand then gently slid his nose under and nudged my hand upwards slightly.

  I made no sharp movements. I just let my hand be nudged over his head until I could scratch him behind his ears.

  Friendly relations established, I continued fussing him for as long as he kept nudging my hand. Then he whined and curled up on the seat. It didn’t take long until he was chasing rabbits in his sleep.

  For a while, as I watched him twitch and sleep, then twitch and sleep, I must admit to wishing I had a dog’s life, certainly until things went so badly wrong, but I didn’t.

  I didn’t truthfully know what life was going to be like now. I know I’d told Daisy that it was a question of how we survive before we die, but that now sounded like hopeless proselytising. Life
, I guessed was going to be hard, damned hard, and less than a week into the whole apocalypse thing, I admit to doubting whether surviving was going to worthwhile.

  We all have a strong instinct for self-preservation, but when it doesn’t look like self-preservation was worth the effort, what else was there to do but lie down and die?

  I shook my head, trying to fling the negative thoughts out of my mind. I’m not that kind of person as a rule and I couldn’t see how letting myself think the negative stuff, was ever going to help.

  Where there’s life there’s hope somebody said once.

  I preferred to think that where there’s hope there’s life. The trouble is that left the question of what happened when all hope was gone?

  “You OK, Frank?” David asked. Lucy had fallen asleep which I think was the best thing for her. No flashbacks when you’re asleep as I had found out the night before.

  “I’m fine, David. What about you?”

  David headed over, sitting on the edge of the desk, looking out over the distant green countryside.

  “I’m OK. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Everything I suppose. The way we were yesterday. For being off with you last night. Mostly I’m sorry for freezing today. All I could see was that monster holding on to Lucy and not knowing what to do. You rescued her and I’m grateful.”

  “I appreciate it, David. How’s she holding up?” I nodded toward where Lucy was lying down, breathing slowly and deeply.

  “She’s upset, naturally. I think she is shocked at herself for what she did. I know I was. She’s such a quiet, peace-loving girl. She told me a bit about what was in the cellar.” He looked down at his hands, then up into my eyes. “She said it was bad.”

  “It was. I can’t imagine much worse in all honesty.” I stared away out of the window, trying to get the flashing images of those women out of my head. Unsuccessfully as it turned out, provoking an upsurge of anger.

  “She said she just snapped. A rush of blood. She’s worried that you’ll just take off and leave us here because of it.”

  I laughed a wry laugh. “You can assure her that’s not going to happen, David. She did what she did. I don’t suppose it will be the worst thing we have to do and if it is, she got it out of the way early and we can all look forward to a brighter future ahead.” I didn’t look back at David, just let my worlds sink in a little.

  “You don’t mean that, do you?”

  “Don’t mean what?”

  “The bit about it being the worst thing we have to do.”

  “In truth, David, I don’t know. I hope it is, but I don’t know and I’m getting a headache trying to sort things out in my head.”

  “Sorry.”

  I sighed. “Don’t be. I guess you’re going through something similar. You would have to be a very unthinking kind of person not to be, and you don’t strike me as that.”

  David took a deep breath, then let it all out in a rush. Mungo opened one eye, had a sniff, then closed it again.

  “I’m confused, more than anything. I don’t feel like I have a place in this world. I’ll be truthful, when you arrived and started yelling about the gun, I panicked because I didn’t know what I was doing with it. That’s how I feel about life right now. I’ve never felt like that before. I always had dreams and ambitions, and they’ve all gone. Now I have nothing to aim for other than to survive and I don’t know how to do that.”

  “Join the club, David. I bet there isn’t a living man, woman, or child out there who knows how or whether they will survive. None of us do. The sooner you accept that it’s like that now, the sooner you can start to try, because if you don’t even try …” I left the sentence unfinished. I was sure he could fill in the blanks.

  “Thanks, Frank. I’ve always been wary of posh types like you. I always thought you were a different breed somehow. All what-ho and chasing foxes. I was never very political before but it’s kind of bred into people somehow.”

  “I might talk differently, David but most days I was knee deep in cow shit or mucking out stables. Truth is, as this seems to be proving, none of us was more than a few hours or days away from dropping back to the dark ages.”

  “Maybe. You could be right.”

  “Oh, I’m right. No doubt about that. The way things are we’re all heading that way no matter what your accent is.” Suddenly, after only three hours sleep and everything else that morning I was tired. My head was starting to buzz. “Listen, David. Will you be OK to watch for a while?”

  “Sure. That I can do.”

  “Great. I need to sleep. I need to switch off my head for a while.”

  “I understand. That’s what she said,” David said, pointing back to Lucy.

  I stood from the windowsill and David took my place. I laid a hand on his shoulder in thanks and headed for my sleeping bag.

  Once I was in, I turned on my side, trying to keep the light from the window out of my eyes. A minute later, before I had drifted off, I heard sniffing, then the solid weight of a small dog, making itself a bed behind my knees.

  ***

  When I woke, it wasn’t a gentle alarm going off, or the smell of hot coffee being made as I wished it had been. Instead it was the constant barking of the dog. It was back on the office chair. Every time it barked it gave a little jump off its front legs and tipped its head back slightly.

  It seemed to be going crazy. “Mungo, quiet,” I said, remembering the command Jamie had used, and he stopped making a racket, and sat on the chair. His eyes were fixed outside the window, head unmoving, ears pricked to the full.

  “What’s going on,” I mumbled, my mouth dry and furry.

  “Nothing as far as I can see,” Lucy said.

  “Where’s David?”

  “Toilet.”

  “How long have you been awake.”

  “Half an hour I suppose.”

  “Are you feeling better?” I forced myself out of the sleeping bag, ready to stand and head over to the window.

  “Not really. You? David said you had a headache.”

  I had to think about it for a moment, then I nodded. “Much better. Lack of sleep is all it was.”

  Mungo gave another sharp bark and started twisting his head from side to side.

  I stepped over and went to ruffle his head, but he cowered away again. What had that bastard Jamie done to the poor creature to ruin his trust in people? I offered my hand again and after a sniff he resumed his position.

  “Is anything out there?”

  “No. A Groaner wandered by a few minutes ago but that’s the first one David had seen since you fell asleep. Other than that, nothing.”

  “There must be something, Lucy. Is your gun reloaded?”

  I checked my pistol and tucked it back in my jeans.

  Lucy shook her head. “Go and get it reloaded and ready, and check David’s is ready too.”

  I peered out of the window, fearful suddenly. Mungo hadn’t moved and was still staring and listening intently at the window.

  Then I heard it. Some noise, dull and distant still, but definitely there. A rumble that might have been thunder almost, except for the clear blue, late-afternoon sky, and the fact that it didn’t stop.

  As it got louder, I got more and more concerned. It was something heavy, big, and moving quickly in our direction from the north. I moved angles, so I could see in the direction where all the Groaners seemed to be headed whenever they came by. I hoped that wasn’t an omen for the plan I had of heading north.

  Eventually it was clear there was something on the road heading our way and whatever it was, I didn’t like the sound of it. Don’t ask me why, I just got the feeling that anything that big meant people, and so far, the only people I had come across, other than Daisy, Lucy, and David of course, had meant trouble and death.

  I stood at the side of the window now as the sound approached, watching as best I could until finally I could see the source of the noise. A large army truck—canvas top on—ru
mbled along the road, slowing as it approached before swinging wide and driving straight in through the gate. As soon as it squealed to a stop with a hiss of airbrakes, the flap across the back was dropped and six soldiers jumped out, their heavy boots thudding into the ground. The man in charge of the group shouted an instruction I couldn’t hear, and four of the men headed toward the gate while one took up position at the front of the green-painted truck. Every one of them was armed and in full gear.

  It was a sight for sore eyes, I’d be the first to admit.

  Once the leader, a sergeant from what I could see was happy they had the area covered he slung his gun over his shoulder and went back to the lorry.

  He reached up with his hand and I saw another hand take his. Female I would have guessed but as soon as the figure jumped down I knew who it was immediately.

  It was Daisy.

  I stepped in front of the window and banged on it to get her attention, then I found the catch and opened the small opening at the top, so I could shout.

  “Daisy, up here.”

  The soldier with her quickly had his rifle back in his shooting position covering the window where I was.

  “Daisy? The woman who dropped you here?” Lucy said behind me.

  I turned to look at her with a smile on my face, a broad smile. Her own face switched from mildly interested to puzzlingly disgusted until I remembered I was supposed to be the mean, moody, unsmiling Frank.

  “She came back.” I couldn’t believe it.

  I turned back to look out of the window again. Daisy was waving and jumping up and down.

  “Frank, I’m so glad you’re still here,” she yelled up to me.

  “Me too. I’ll come down and open up.” I pulled the window closed again and headed off down the stairs with Mungo right behind me.