I checked the bedroom he had come out of for further inhabitants but it was empty. A patch of dried blood and gore on the sheets told me the nasty had lain there for a long while. Zombies didn’t sleep as far as I knew so he was probably going through the motions of his former life, as Tanya had said.
I went to the first closed door and opened it. The room was empty. Rock band posters on the walls and a game console attached to a large TV in the corner told me it probably belonged to a teenager. There was no sign of him in the room. Maybe he had been away at college when the virus outbreak started.
The next room was also empty. The light floral wallpaper and knitting on the chair in the corner probably meant it belonged to the old lady downstairs. Whatever she had been knitting would never be finished now.
I went downstairs to find the others.
Sam was outside, dragging the old lady’s rotting body across the mud. I found Tanya and Jax in the kitchen.
“Did you find any more?” I asked them.
“No,” Jax said, shaking her head.
“There’s one upstairs,” I said. “Looks like the farmer.”
“The old lady was probably his mother,” Tanya said. “No wife? Kids?”
“There’s a teenager’s bedroom upstairs. Maybe their son was away at the time and never came home.”
She walked lithely into the hallway and pointed at a photograph on the wall. It showed a man in his fifties with a pretty blonde woman and a dark-haired boy of sixteen or seventeen. They were all smiling at the camera. “So where’s the woman?” Tanya asked.
“Maybe she was away too. Visiting the son in college or something.” I didn’t really care where the wife was as long as she wasn’t here trying to tear my throat out. Tanya and Jax were journalists so I supposed they had more curiosity about these things than I did.
Tanya went back into the kitchen and opened a door that led into a large pantry. There was plenty of food in there and my stomach did a little flip of anticipation. Tanya wasn’t searching for food, though. She checked the dining room before going out into the hallway and opening a small door underneath the stairs.
“There’s a basement,” she said, pointing to an opening in the floor and a ladder leading down into darkness.
Tanya leaned over the opening and tried to see what was down there. “Too dark,” she said.
Remembering the working lights at Mason’s Farm, I reached in and found a switch on the wall. I clicked it on and the area beneath the stairs and the basement below lit up. Tanya went down the ladder cautiously. A moment later, she called, “It’s okay. Come down.”
Jax went down and I followed. When we reached the tiny basement, I had to stoop to keep from hitting my head on the low ceiling. The basement was actually little more than a crawl space used for storing tools and sports equipment, which I guessed had belonged to the son.
The wife was in the corner, recognisable as the woman in the photo upstairs by her blonde hair. She was dead. Really dead. Not turned.
“She must have come down here when her husband and the old lady changed,” I said. “She was too scared to go back up into the house and eventually she just died down here. She didn’t even dare put the light on.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Tanya said. “There are things down here she could have used as weapons. She could have gotten out of the house. Why stay down here waiting to die when you can fight your way out?”
“Not everybody thinks the same way,” I said. “Where would she go to if she got out? Her husband had turned. The old lady might have been her mother. She probably thought everyone in the world had changed like them. She had nothing to live for.”
“What about the son?” Tanya didn’t seem to understand the concept of giving up, not fighting for survival.
I shrugged. “She must have thought he was changed or dead. And if he was alive, how would she find him? She wouldn’t last five minutes out there.”
Tanya nodded slowly. I could see she was trying to understand but her job took her to places where situations were dire yet people fought for survival. It was what she knew.
If I hadn’t been with Mike, Elena, and Lucy when the shit hit the fan, I probably would have ended up like this woman. Afraid to leave my house. Somebody would find me one day and I would be lying dead among video games and fast food containers.
“We need to give her a proper burial,” Jax said.
Tanya nodded. “I can’t believe she didn’t fight.”
I didn’t say anything else but as I looked down on the corpse of the woman, I totally understood her choice. Fight for what? She had no future.
And now that I was separated from Lucy, what was I fighting for? A life of roaming from one farm to the next, trying to stay one step ahead of the army and clearing houses of zombies? That was no life.
Being with Mike, Elena, and Lucy had taught me that sometimes I had to fight for what I wanted.
I was willing to fight to get back to Lucy. That was the only thought keeping me going right now.
Without that thin strand of hope, I might as well be like the dead woman lying at my feet.
eleven
We removed the farmer’s body and dumped it next to the old lady’s in a ditch. Sam and I found shovels in the basement and dug a grave behind the house for the blonde woman. For some reason, we afforded her more respect because she had died without becoming one of the nasties.
When I thought about it logically, it didn’t make sense that we should treat the zombies any differently; they had died too. But the virus turned them into monsters and that threw all logic out of the window.
They died as monsters and we treated them as such.
After we buried the woman, Sam and I stood over the fresh grave silently for a moment. We bowed our heads. I thought about the friends I had lost in the apocalypse and I hoped I didn’t lose any more. I wasn’t religious in any way but I said a silent prayer that I would find Lucy and she would be alive and well.
Sam raised his head and looked at me. There were tears in his eyes. He had been thinking about his own loved ones. “Let’s go back inside, man. We’ve done all we can for this woman.”
I nodded and as we walked to the house I wondered if these three people now numbered among my friends. I barely knew them but they seemed like decent people. They had let me join them and we had fought together. I didn’t know how long they would let me stay with them…they seemed to have some mission to carry out…and I didn’t know what I would do when we parted ways but for now I was glad to be with them.
As we reached the door, Sam turned to me with a serious look on his face. “There’s something we need to do now, Alex. It’s very important.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
A grin spread across his face. “We need to find beer.”
*
Later, Jax and I sat in the living room while Tanya and Sam fussed about in the kitchen cooking a meal. They had a friendly, joking banter between them and I wondered if they were a couple, or should be a couple. Outside, it was getting dark. We had opened all the windows in the house and left them open all afternoon to let fresh air into the house. The rotting smell was gone and now the house was filled with the fragrance of chicken being fried in herbs and spices. In his search for beer, Sam had found a freezer packed with meat.
He had also eventually found a case of beer in the pantry. A dozen bottles of Spitfire ale. A half-drained bottle sat in front of me on the coffee table as I waited for the meal. The smell of the chicken was driving me crazy.
Jax had lit a fire in the stone fireplace. The logs crackled and popped. With the ceiling light dimmed, the fire flickered orange on the walls, making the room seem cozy. Jax had unfolded her map and laid it on the rug in front of the fireplace. It showed the surrounding area and Swansea to the west. She had placed a second map next to it. That was a map of Britain, showing the contours of the coast.
I had asked her earlier about the “media lies” she had mentione
d in the forest and she said they would explain everything to me after we ate. I couldn’t argue with that; right now, food was my main priority.
Sam stuck his head through the door. “Come and get it.”
We gathered in the dining room around a large oak table. Sam and Tanya had set out plates and cutlery and in the middle of the table sat two big serving bowls. One was full of boiled white rice. The other contained a mouth-watering chicken curry. Four bottles of Spitfire sat next to the rice.
I sat and said, “That looks and smells great.”
Sam laughed and said, “Tanya’s curries are great but she makes them spicy, man. If you’re not used to them, they go right through you.” He looked at Tanya and said, “We’ll probably be fighting zombies tomorrow and Alex will have to excuse himself to go shit behind a tree.”
She slapped him on the shoulder playfully. “I’m not taking the blame for that. You had just as much a hand in making it as I did. You’re the one who was heavy-handed with the spices.”
“I had to do something to cover up the way you fried the chicken with too much coriander,” he said, looking at me and winking, letting me in on his joke.
“You liar!” Tanya said.
“Well it smells great,” I said. We set about loading the curry and rice onto our plates and grabbing a bottle of beer each.
“Who’s going to do the toast?” Jax asked.
“I’ll do it,” Sam said. He raised his bottle and said, “The fallen and the lost.”
We all repeated it and started eating. The curry tasted amazing, despite Sam’s jokes.
“How about a little radio?” Sam asked through a mouthful of food. He went out of the room and I heard him digging about in his backpack. He came back in with a small digital radio and placed it in the middle of the table. He switched it on and the familiar, smooth voice of DJ Johnny Drake filled the room.
“…to all the survivors out there alone. This one is for you from Matt in Survivors Camp Delta. This is The Doors and ‘Riders on the Storm’.” The music started and we listened to it as we ate. Sam sang along here and there but mainly we just let it work its magic on us. In this post-apocalyptic world, music had gained an added importance beyond its ability to lift our moods; it was a relic of the old world.
Unlike other relics such as cars and fast food restaurants and coffee shops, music seemed alive. It spoke to a deep place inside us. It was the same with books. I had read a selection of books on The Big Easy and my mind craved more. Even though the books on the boat were thriller novels that I might not have read before the apocalypse—I usually stuck to sci fi and horror—they nourished my soul by giving me a connection with the past that other inanimate objects could not.
As soon as the radio had been turned on, the mood in the dining room went up. I felt easy, relaxed. The beer helped but mainly it was Jim Morrison singing about life, and the mellow keyboards. When The Doors finished, the Eurythmics song “Here Comes the Rain Again” started. Over the opening bars, Johnny Drake said, “This is a request for Lisa in Survivors Camp Gamma.”
“They’re naming the camps now,” Jax said.
Tanya nodded.
As we finished the meal, I wondered how many times the farmer and his family had sat around this table enjoying dinner together. They could not have guessed that one day the world would be changed forever, they would all be dead, and a group of strangers would be sitting at the table listening to music and eating curry. For that family, it was all over.
Maybe they were the lucky ones.
We pushed the empty plates away and took our beers into the living room where the fire still crackled in the fireplace. Sam brought the radio in and placed it on the mantelpiece. Rhiannon was singing about an umbrella.
“Come and look at this map,” Tanya said, pointing to the map of Britain. I sat on the rug next to her.
“Is it possible to take a boat from here”—she indicated the coast near our current location— “to here?” She pointed farther south at the city of Truro in Cornwall.
I had been to Cornwall on holiday when I was ten years old. My parents had taken Joe and me to Truro to look at the port. There had been some big ships there. “Yes, it’s possible to take a boat there,” I said, “but why Truro? It’s no different from any other city.”
“It is different,” Tanya replied, “because that’s where the radio station is being broadcast from.” She looked at me closely but I didn’t get her point.
I looked at Jax and Sam sitting on the sofa. “I don’t understand.”
Jax leaned forwards and told me their plan.
“We’re going to take over Survivor Radio.”
twelve
“I still don’t understand,” I said. “Why?”
“We’re only going to take it over temporarily,” Tanya said. “We need to get a message out to anyone who’s listening.”
“What message?”
“The people in the Survivors Camps need to leave. The people outside of the camps need to stay there and not report to the military checkpoints.”
I looked from one to the other of my new friends. The firelight flickered on their solemn faces. They were serious. They were actually considering taking over Survivor Radio. I could only imagine how well the army must be guarding their one media channel. How did Tanya, Jax, and Sam think they were going to get into the studio? Just walk in under the noses of the soldiers?
“I’ve seen what happens in those camps,” I said. “I’m sure the people in them already know they should leave.”
“They’re being fed misinformation,” Jax said. “As far as they know, there isn’t anywhere safe to go. They’re like that woman in the basement…afraid to leave because they don’t think there’s safety anywhere else.”
“There isn’t,” I reminded her.
“Yes, there is,” Tanya said. “Just not in this country.”
“Where?”
“America.”
I shook my head, remembering the news reports I had seen on the Solstice. “The virus has reached America. They’re as infected as we are.”
“That’s not true,” Jax said.
Maybe they just didn’t know it yet, hadn’t seen the news reports on the internet. “It was on the internet news. I saw the reports with my own eyes. The president called a state of emergency. One of the headlines said there was a virus outbreak in the U.S.”
“When was this?”
I tried to count off the days in my mind. “Six or seven days ago.”
Sam laughed and shook his head. “That was propaganda bullshit, man.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Yeah, I can. Vigo Johnson is in the States right now. I spoke to him on a satellite phone two days ago. All they knew over there for a while was that Britain had gone dark. The U.S. government sent military aircraft over and looked at images from spy satellites and now they have some idea of what is happening but there’s no virus over there. It’s only here.”
“What about India?” I asked, “That’s where the virus came from.”
Jax shook her head. “No, Alex, that’s a lie. The news reports said there was a patient zero in London but I had been investigating reports of an unknown virus a week before that story came out. There were sightings of patients turning blue and staggering out of hospitals before the London story was concocted.
“These sightings and reports started in Scotland and moved south across the country. They didn’t originate in London. The government is trying to wash their hands of all responsibility by blaming a virus from another country. The truth is, the thing started in Scotland. Probably escaped from a military test centre or something. My bet is it all started on Apocalypse Island.”
“Apocalypse Island?” I wondered if these people were journalists for respected media outlets or conspiracy theory websites.
“It’s a nickname,” Jax said, “for a government facility on an island off the coast of Scotland. The place is run by scientists conducting experim
ents into diseases like foot and mouth and mad cow disease. If this virus came from that area, it must be from Apocalypse Island. Somebody messed up and it got to the mainland. The rest was inevitable once it reached a population of people to infect.”
“Have you seen this island?” I asked.
She shook her head. “But we’ve all heard about it. And if it’s true, that’s where the virus came from.”
I took a deep swallow of beer as I tried to process what I was being told. “Does it matter where the virus came from? The fact is, it’s here. I know you guys are journalists and want to get to the bottom of things like this but for people like me, all that matters is that there are zombies trying to kill us.”
“It matters, Alex,” Tanya said, “because if they created this virus, they might have a vaccine. Something that stops you from turning if you get bit. Don’t you think the people have a right to know if that’s the case?”
“If there’s a vaccine, they’d be injecting everyone in the camps,” I suggested.
“And what happens then, man?” Sam asked. “Everyone wouldn’t feel so helpless. They might leave the “safety” of the camps and find out that the rest of the world is hunky dory. Everyone would flee by any means possible, leaving the politicians in control of nothing but a country full of the undead. The way things are now, they are still in control of the people. That’s what they want.
“They can’t have it any other way. If the rest of the world found out the truth and it was a manmade virus that escaped from a government facility, the people in charge would be mass murderers. They would be tried as such. No way, man…better to spread propaganda and keep the population under control.”
I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed. I had never trusted the media. Tanya, Jax, and Sam worked for an industry that was known for putting a spin on everything. On the other hand, I had seen with my own eyes the military takeover of the marina at Swansea. The story would explain that. There might be a grain of truth in what they were telling me but they were filling in the rest themselves.
Undead Rain (Book 2): Storm Page 5