by Ryan Colley
Next, was food. An average male needed twenty-five hundred calories a day. Monthly, that’s … a lot. There was no more fresh food, so everything was tinned, canned, and salted. That was a lot to carry. Did I even have a can opener? I’d have to wing it. Water was easy. Food and nutrition were a lot harder. I would take as many MRE’s, tins, and bars as I could. It wasn’t that far into the end of the world – food would still be about. So a couple of pallets and crates would do it. I also stole a few dustsheets for covering myself should at night, for warmth and camouflage
I stood back, admiring my transit van of supplies. I couldn’t believe it. Before long, I would be on my way. I just stood there and smiled. I really couldn’t believe it. I would soon be travelling to see Alice again.
All I had left was my super suit, the bullet, Thundy, my phone, the knife, and my boiler suit when it returned to me. I would be leaving the following day. I wanted to stick around for the party and plan my journey, and then I was gone.
I was sad to be leaving the place Boss had made safe. It had done so much for me, and so had the people. Especially Boss. I was sad to leave him, but I would say my goodbyes. Besides, goodbye didn’t mean forever. I could see them again. I couldn’t stop smiling. Also couldn’t stop yawning. Time for a few hours of shuteye before the party.
Broadcast Seven: Wartime Broadcasting Service
This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been affected by an unknown pathogen. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength. Stay calm and stay in your own house.
Remember, there is nothing to be gained by trying to get away. By leaving your homes you could be exposing yourself to greater danger. Keep away from those who are believed to be infected. It does not matter if they are family or friends. They are a threat to yourself and others.
If you leave, you may find yourself without food, without water, without accommodation, and without protection. It is not believed that the pathogen is airborne, but it is not confirmed. Roofs and walls offer substantial protection from the infected. The safest place is indoors, preferably somewhere you know. Make sure gas and other fuel supplies are turned off and that all fires are extinguished. If mains water is available, this can be used for fire-fighting. You should also refill all your drinking water containers after the fires have been put out, because the mains water supply may not be available for very long.
Water must not be used for flushing lavatories. Until you are told that lavatories may be used again, other toilet arrangements must be made. Use your water only for essential drinking and cooking purposes. Water means life. Do not waste it.
Make your food stocks last. Ration your supply because it may have to last for fourteen days or more. If you have fresh food in the house, use this first to avoid wasting it. Food in tins will keep.
If you live in an area where there are confirmed sightings of the infected, ensure you remain unseen and silent. When the immediate danger has passed, the sirens will sound a steady note. The "All Clear" message will also be given on this wavelength. If you leave your home to go to the lavatory or to replenish food or water supplies, do not remain outside the room for a minute longer than is necessary. You will attract the attention of any infected the longer you are outside.
Do not, in any circumstances, interact with the infected. If you do interact with the infected, you will bring danger to your family and you may die. Stay in your house or shelter until you are told it is safe to come out or you hear the “All Clear” on the sirens. The military and government are doing their best to contain and quarantine the situation. Help is coming. Keep hope alive.
Here are the main points again. Stay in your own homes, and if you live in an area where the infected have been spotted, then a warning has been given stay in your house until you are told it is safe to come out. The message that the immediate danger has passed will be given by the sirens and repeated on this wavelength. Make sure that the gas and all fuel supplies are turned off and that all fires are extinguished. Water must be rationed and used only for essential drinking and cooking purposes. It must not be used for flushing lavatories. Ration your food supply – it may have to last for fourteen days or more.
We shall be on the air every hour, on the hour. Stay tuned to this wavelength, but switch your radios off now to save your batteries.
That is the end of this broadcast.
CHAPTER 45
I awoke to the sound of people passing my porta-cabin. I remembered Bill guarding the container of undead, and then I remembered the celebration. Once my adrenaline spike had disappeared, I realised I was actually excited to have another party. I needed time to chill out again. Time to say my goodbyes.
When I reached the central area, I wondered how I’d ever get used to the place? Not that I needed to since I was leaving. I noticed the layout was a little different than the previous party night. Hanging down one container was a huge white sheet, with the techie guy from before fiddling with a projector. Sweet! Looked like movie night. I preferred movies over music. As always, crates of beer were being stacked nearby. There were tons of chairs set about, like a makeshift open-air cinema. Once again, people were milling about. I truly felt like one of the guys the second time around and didn’t mind helping out at all. I wanted to do my part.
“I’ll get those,” I said to the techie guy, pointing to some large speakers. He smiled and continued playing with his laptop and projector. I carried them over and put them where he had wanted them previously. He tapped a few buttons on a laptop, and images were projected onto the white cloth. The speaker started playing some music, indicating the start of the film, with no horrible feedback from the speakers that time. The techie smiled at his progress.
“Nice one,” I smiled and patted his shoulder. He grinned at me.
I left to assist others. I helped carry boxes of food – tons of cinema style snacks without the outrageous prices. There were even people setting up coolers filled with alcoholic beverages as well as soft drinks. Everything was coming together perfectly.
Darkness began to fall, and movie night would soon begin. Once again, a few stood watch on the walls. Boss silenced everyone.
“Gentlemen, and gentlemen!” he announced, with a huge smile. “There’s not much news to tell this week. As we all know, we have secured the mall, our soon to be new home.”
“Hell yeah!” someone shouted.
“Quiet down there,” Boss laughed, raising his hand. “Naturally, this is big news, and we need to discuss our plan of what’s next. But not tonight. Tonight is for alcohol and movies.”
Pentecostal cheers of the faithful.
“Let’s do this! Keep moving forward!” Boss leapt down from the container. Music from the film sounded. Boss approached me.
“Pretty epic,” I smiled. Boss began guiding me to the projector screen.
“Well, let’s settle down and end this night with a movie,” he pushed me down into a chair before disappearing. He had a habit of vanishing like that. I think he even enjoyed the celebrity status he felt he had. Someone pushed a beer into my hand, and the movie played on the big screen. I watched the footage and realised something – I knew the film. 28 Days Later. I loved it. What an amazing apocalypse film!
The film opened up with the protagonist waking from a coma. He had awoken in the post-apocalypse world and didn’t know what had happened. The streets of London were empty, which I couldn’t help but reflect on how different it was from my own experience. He wandered aimlessly, grabbing unnecessary items such as money. He soon ended up in a church, looking down over tons of dead bodies. I felt uneasy watching the scene for some reason. Not because I knew what was coming, but for another reason. Something wasn’t right. It was hard to explain, but the bodies just didn’t look real. I know they weren’t real. It was a film, but they lacked any realism. The
film played out the same way it always had and always would. The reveal of the zombies, or the infected, depending on what stance you took on the whole undead–infected human debate. I always came down on the infected side for that film. Wounds other than headshots killed these movie monsters, so they weren’t zombies.
The protagonist is in a church when he calls out, almost like a joke meant just for the audience, and that’s when we first see the infected. They rise from the piles of bodies and begin chasing the protagonist.
I … something felt wrong about the film. It just didn’t have the right feel. Sure, the film hadn’t aged particularly well, but that was part of the charm. Proper British cinema. The blood and gore looked ridiculously fake. It … what was wrong with the film? I was … I watched the infected get chopped to pieces and gore fly. I began to feel uncomfortable, anxious even. I was sweaty. Such a sudden onset. Was I sick? I felt that way in the mall. The explosions and shouts, they were too loud. Too bright. Damn. Every gunshot, I jumped. I needed to get out of there. I’d had anxiety attacks before, but nothing like what I was experiencing then. Was it even an anxiety attack? There was an intense pounding in my head, and the film was making it worse. I felt nauseous.
I got up. World spinning. I tumbled. Dropped my beer. People sped by. A few turned to look. I needed to get away. I kept going. Stumbling and walking until I couldn’t see the film. Until I couldn’t hear it. I leaned against a container, panting. Sweat pouring off me. Trembling.
“Fuck!” I said through gritted teeth. The pounding in my head began to subside, and my breathing slowed. I breathed out slowly, “Fuuuck.”
I just wanted to be alone and lie down. I stumbled back through the twisting and turning maze of containers, which seemed to go on forever, until I found my room. I opened the door and fell in. I crawled into my bed and made myself as small as possible. What was happening to me?
I don’t know how long I laid there for, but I didn’t sleep. The drained and terrified feeling remained. I felt so exhausted but couldn’t drift off. Bang! Bang! Bang! Gunfire. I jolted up and scrambled for the knife, feeling around in the dark. Then realisation dawned. No, not gunfire. Someone knocking on the door.
“Who is it?” I asked, trying to hide a groan.
“Boss,” he opened the door and stumbled in, a drunken swagger to his steps. He hadn’t been drunk when I’d left. How long had I been gone? My mind kept flashing to the knife. I had to find it. I was hypersensitive. I couldn’t think straight.
“Uh,” I grunted in reply.
“You left in a hurry earlier,” Boss slurred.
“Wasn’t feeling too good,” I said truthfully.
“Ah, you’ll feel better after a sleep,” he replied, waving away my issues. “You’re leaving tomorrow, right?”
“That’s the plan,” I agreed.
“I really wish you’d stay, man,” Boss said sadly – he clearly liked me, although I felt I’d given him no reason to. “I wish I could convince you. It’s just tail you’re chasing, right?”
There was no sense in trying to correct a drunk person, so I forced smile, “In a way.”
“Ah, you can get that anywhere!” he laughed, waving his hands to the imaginary hordes of women around us.
“I know,” I laughed, not at the validity of his statement, but at the way he acted.
“Hey,” he said suddenly. “I got something to show ya. If you promise to keep it a secret.”
“Uh, sure,” I smiled. I was confused by the sudden shift in conversation and tone, but I always found alcohol made people inconsistent.
“No!” he stooped to my level and grabbed my shoulder. He stared into my eyes. “Say it like you mean it.”
“I promise I won’t tell anyone your secret,” I rolled my eyes. I didn’t like his touch. Still felt clammy and ill.
“Our secret,” he stood up straight and held out his hand. After I took it, he pulled me to my feet. My head still spun.
“Let’s go and see our secret,” I said. I still felt awful, like I’d lost an emotional and mental fight, but I felt a little better with each passing minute. Boss draped his arm around me and began leading me in the direction of whatever he wanted to show me.
Everywhere was eerily quiet. Everyone had gone to bed except for the odd one or two people patrolling the walls. I only knew they were there by the clang of their footsteps on the metal containers. The term dead of night echoed through the passages of my mind. Ignorant to the creepiness that had set in, Boss strode along – a lot steadier than expected for a drunk man. He was guiding me with an excited purpose.
We passed the doctor’s room, heading towards the remotest part of the base. The part which hadn’t yet been designated for use, and the containers were disorganised. No one had any reason to be there. As far as I knew, neither did we.
“Here it is!” Boss stopped outside of a container. There wasn’t anything special about it. Except it had a red mark on it to indicate there were zombies within. The mark looked a lot fresher and less weathered than any of the others. Had others died recently? Stranger, I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d seen the container before.
“Where are we?” the hair on my neck was standing up. There wasn’t a chill in the air, but something wasn’t right.
“You’ll see,” he giggled, sounding manic. Then it hit me why the area seemed familiar. It was the container Bill had been guarding. Boss reached for the door pulley and began to open it. I reached for my knife, but it wasn’t on me. I had to stop the drunken madman.
I moved to barrel him out of the way and then slam down into the door. I couldn’t let him let the dead out. But it was too late. The door was open, and he had slipped in. I turned to run, but there were no screams, no wet chewing of flesh. Did the undead get him that fast? No, that wasn’t right. They would’ve come out the moment we were illuminated by the moonlight.
“Boss?” I walked into the container. It was dark in there, and it smelled bad. Not undead bad. Definitely not the rot of flesh, but human waste bad. Piss and shit and sweat. I covered my nose.
Fear crept into my voice. “Boss?”
He turned on a light. A lantern or flashlight, or a goddamn candle for all I knew, because that wasn’t what my eyes were on.
“Boss?” I asked again, voice getting higher. I refused to believe what I was seeing.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” Boss said, with a smug smile. No! No, it isn’t!
“When did this happen? How long?” My mind raced with rage and disbelief.
“A couple days. Not all that long ago,” he turned to me, a dreamy look in his eyes.
“Who … who else knows?” I had stopped the shaking in my voice, and I had control over my disgust now. But that didn’t stop the tremble of a primordial rage from reaching my hands.
“Just you and me. A couple others. Bill knows, too,” Boss took a swig of beer. “I’m gonna slowly tell others, but I don’t want everyone knowing at once. What do you think?”
“Unexpected. Definitely a new development,” I chose my words carefully, my hand balled into a fist and trembled. My knuckles were white.
“I’m showing you this so that you don’t have to leave so soon,” he wrapped his arm around me. He whispered into my ear, his hot breath sticking to me. “Do you think you’ll stick around?”
I thought about his question for what felt like an age, but it was probably only a couple seconds. I stared at the two women, Kirsty and Stephanie. Their wrists bloody from fighting against their restraints. They were on their knees, sitting in their own waste and filth. Faces red and blotchy, partly from an assault and partly from crying. They were mostly naked. A large potato sack-like piece of material covered them, giving people easy access to their … their … I stared at the fear on their face and the hatred in their eyes before finally answering.
“Sure, I think I can stay a bit longer,” I said with an iciness that only I was aware of.
“Brilliant!” Boss cheered, and drunkenly hugged me. A
shiver spread over my body. “I knew we were the same. I knew you would want to stay. After all, you gave me the idea. Men need more than food, water, and shelter. They need women! This will be your legacy just as much as mine.”
A pit crept into my gut. The shiver travelling up my spine met the chill in my neck. The coldness spread throughout me and down to my bones. I needed to do something.
We didn’t talk much more that night. I headed back to my cabin, and Boss to his. I returned with a couple things I hadn’t left with before – a bottle of vodka and a bestial, boiling black-tar pit of unstoppable rage.
I never took my eyes off the container as I retreated. I felt numb. Sickened to my core. What I saw in that container, that I had inadvertently given Boss the idea for … part of me died that day.
CHAPTER 46
I awoke, a blinding headache pulsing across my head. I pulled myself away from the mattress. The motion caused me to vomit, emptying my insides onto my outsides. I looked around the room and saw the destruction.
The night prior hadn’t been a dream. I’d so desperately hoped that the last twenty-four hours had been a figment created by my twisted mind and empowered by alcohol to induce the hallucination. The chair had been smashed to pieces. Broken glass littered the floor. It really wasn’t a dream. I wasn’t going to wake up from the reality I existed in.
The super suit – no, the leather jacket no longer read ZOMBIE SQUAD, but had a white smear. I had emptied some of the vodka on it in a drunken rage and washed it away. The apocalypse wasn’t child’s play. Wasn’t a game. Why did I ever think it was? There are monsters out there, and they aren’t the undead. People are the monsters. People like Boss and Harrington. Evil people. They were doing much worse things than any mindless monster could. They were cold and calculating beasts, prowling the world under the guise of humans. I couldn’t let them carry on. No way. I had to –