by Ryan Casey
He pushed Kesha towards Anna. Heard Kesha crying. And he started to cry too. Because he’d dodged death so many times. He’d dodged it too many times. He’d seen so many people fall. Friends. Family. People he loved.
It was his time.
It was his turn.
“No,” Anna said.
She pushed Kesha back, and she reached out for Riley’s hand.
“Anna, you have to go!”
“No. I’m not leaving you behind. The time for leaving people behind is long gone.”
Riley shook his head. The mass of the creatures pushed heavier. “There’s no time.”
“I love you, Riley. I love you. There’s always time.”
And it was when Anna said those words that Riley felt it. It was when she said it that, for the first time, he felt something that had gone unspoken between them.
Because she was right.
He loved her.
He loved her, just as she loved him.
So he stretched out his hand. He stretched it out even though the undead were only feet away.
Then he felt his fingers connect with Anna’s.
He felt their hands connect. Their touch intertwine.
And for a moment, amidst the roaring mass of the undead, he didn’t care what happened.
Because they were together.
They had each other.
And then he felt Anna pulling on his hand.
“Come on,” she said.
So he pulled with her. He dragged himself up as best as he could.
He gritted his teeth.
Held his breath.
Forced himself with all he had.
“You have to be ready to run,” she said.
He looked ahead, and he readied himself. Because he was ready. He had to be. There was no other way.
He felt the weight pushing more and more on his back.
Felt the intensity building.
And then he knew it was time.
“Now, Riley!” Anna shouted. “Now!”
He held his breath.
Readied himself.
And then he ran.
It was a split second thing, as he ran away from the broken-down door, Anna by his side, mass of creatures in pursuit, that he realised something.
There was no time to stop.
There was no time to check.
All there was, was time to look at Anna.
To feel the horror of their discovery.
To see the words clear in Anna’s eyes.
Because Kesha wasn’t opposite them anymore.
Kesha wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Kesha was gone.
Chapter Five
Melissa looked outside the window of the helicopter and saw the group surrounding her, and she knew getting away from mainland Britain and back to the island was never going to be as easy as she’d first thought.
The afternoon sun had hidden behind the thick mass of clouds above. Specks of rain were beginning to fall, hitting the windows of the helicopters. They’d been about to leave. Right on the verge of leaving. If they’d left a matter of moments earlier, they could’ve stopped this. They could’ve avoided it.
But this was how it was.
This was what they had to face up to.
The reality of their situation.
There was a group of heavily armed people surrounding them.
And their guns were raised, pointing at the helicopters.
“Let’s not do anything rash here.”
Melissa wasn’t sure where the voice came from. Not at first.
And then she saw the woman standing at the front of the group, gun over her shoulder, smile on her face.
She had long, dark hair. Was wearing a thickly quilted padded jacket. She looked dressed to go to work or something like that. Not dressed for what she was actually doing—leading these armed people, surrounding Melissa and her group.
But then, who did look like they were ready to lead a group like this? Who did look like they were ready to commit the kind of acts that everyone was in this world?
Because everyone was guilty of something. That was the reality. That was the truth. The new truth.
“Turn off the engines,” the woman said.
The engines kept on running.
“Hey,” she repeated. “Turn them off or none of us leave here, okay? Don’t play this stupidly. Because these helicopters are ours now, okay? They’re ours. And you’re going to get on out and hand them over. Either that, or they fall, and none of us leave here.”
Melissa looked across at Harrington. Saw the concern on her face. Beside her, Ted, who looked like he was losing his shit, having post-traumatic flashbacks of some kind.
“What do we do?” Melissa asked.
Harrington glared back at her. Like she was trying to get her head around it. Trying to work out what to do, the best way of going about it.
Then eventually, she sighed. Started to climb out of the helicopter. “We can’t put the helicopters at risk.”
Melissa gritted her teeth. “We can’t put them at risk? Handing them over is putting them at risk.”
“There’s another place. Another place not far from here. We still have a chance to get away. But if we do something stupid here… If we do something stupid then we lose, and the helicopters fall too. If we just let them take the helicopters, then maybe we don’t have to lose. Maybe we don’t have to fall.”
Melissa shook her head. It didn’t sit right with her, this resigned behaviour. Because she was a fighter. She was used to fighting.
But then, what was the old saying someone had once told her?
Sometimes the best way to fight is to take the punch and analyse the next step rather than blindly swinging back.
So she raised her hands in the air. Sighed. “Your call, I guess.”
“Yes,” Harrington said. “Yes, it is.”
She stepped out of the helicopter, waving at the other people in her group in the other two helicopters to do the same.
They stepped out, all of them, one by one. And Melissa found herself stepping out, too. Standing on the ground, standing opposite this woman, her people.
There was a smile on the woman’s face, now. A smile of victory. A smile that, dare she say it, Melissa just didn’t like.
Because it looked like, although satisfied, it wasn’t quite satisfied. It wasn’t quite content. That the victory she’d had was too easy and wasn’t quite enough to fully satisfy her.
“Good,” the woman said, walking towards Melissa, towards Harrington, towards Ted, past the rest of their people. “That’s good. Co-operation is the name of the game. It’s one of my favourite things, you know? One of my outright favourite damned things in the world.”
She stopped. Right opposite one of Harrington’s people. A man. Tall. Lanky.
“Don’t look so glum, babe. It’s about to get a whole lot worse.”
She pulled back her rifle and blasted open the poor guy’s head.
There was another echo of gunfire. More of Harrington’s people falling. And as Melissa held her breath, looking around at the chaos around her, she realised it was primarily the men she was taking out. The armed men. The stronger-looking men.
She went to lift her rifle, to fight back.
But just as quickly as it seemed to have started, it stopped.
Melissa looked around, trying to regain her composure. She looked at the fallen bodies. Looked at the mess around her. Looked at the smoke in the air.
The woman walked up to her. Smiled.
“Now’s the point where we leave,” she said. “But you make sure people know. You make sure people remember. Xanthe visited. And when she did, she brought a real fucking storm along with her.”
She patted Melissa on the shoulder.
Then she walked around her. Walked over to the helicopters. Waved at her people to go in there, to enter.
And as Melissa stood there, all she could do was stare at the chaos.
Sta
re at the loss.
The helicopters kicked into life.
The rival group—Xanthe—departed.
Melissa, Ted, Harrington, and her few remaining people were still standing.
Just.
But they were stranded.
Chapter Six
Alison looked at the street ahead of her and held her breath.
She wanted to take a deep breath of this air. Because this was the air of her home. This was British air, something she hadn’t inhaled for so damned long.
But at the same time, she’d heard the rumours. She’d heard the talk. The talk of the infection, the virus, how its spread was unpredictable.
She’d seen evidence of it. She’d seen it right as she was landing. The moving figures. But she still didn’t really believe it. Even though she’d heard the news—very guarded, very glossed over, but horrifying all the same—she still didn’t believe that the infection was the truth. That the news organisations, people like that, they must’ve made some sort of mistake. They must’ve got something wrong.
There had to be some kind of error. Because the dead didn’t walk. There were no such things as monsters. People infected by rage? She could believe that, at a stretch. What was the movie she and Riley used to love? 28 Days Later, that was it. A masterpiece. Danny Boyle’s best work, Riley used to always say.
There was a believability about that which elevated it above the usual zombie fare. A horrifying reality, a possibility, that made it easy to imagine, in a sense.
But still. The real world couldn’t be like that, could it? The real world couldn’t be as horrifying as the world depicted in the movies.
But then she thought again of the stories she’d heard before the infection. The war. The terrorism. The exploitation, the cruelty.
And as she thought about it, she realised that the movies were really just a depiction of reality, not the other way around. That reality was always far, far scarier than the movies made out.
That was the reality that she had to face up to. The life she had to deal with. That she had to look right in the eye and face.
“Stay close,” the voice of her commander said. “There’s a fair trek before we get to the training camp. And there’s a good chance we’ll bump into some goons along the way. Treat it as a lesson. A lesson in the art of goon killing. Because believe me. You’re gonna have to get pretty adept at it. Pretty used to it.”
Alison felt apprehension in the pit of her stomach when she heard the commander’s words. She looked around at her fellow trainee scouts, saw the apprehension on all their faces. They were all in the same boat, after all. They were all volunteers who had thrown themselves into the new world, thrown themselves into the deep end. They’d left families behind. They’d left friends behind. They’d left their own stories behind.
They all had their reasons. And Alison knew hers was a stretch. A hell of a stretch more than some people’s would be.
It was a hunch. A hunch that maybe, just maybe, there might be someone out there that she still cared about. That maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to make a difference.
She knew there was a chance she’d never go home again to Australia. That she’d never see Stuart again. Or her son.
But she had to believe she was here for the right reasons.
She had to believe she was doing the right thing.
Because for every second she doubted it, doubted herself, the more she longed to be far away from here, to be back home.
“Come on,” the commander barked. “It’s time to walk.”
The first thing that Alison noticed on her walk was the way everything had changed. The way buildings had fallen apart. The way the car windows had been smashed in.
And the blood.
It turned her stomach, just seeing it. She didn’t know what it was at first. Thought it was just overflowing drains, something like that.
But no. That unmistakable red hue. Blood. No doubt about it.
She held onto her rifle, which she’d received advance training about using, tightly.
Remembered what they taught her.
Aim for the head.
Always aim for the head.
So the zombie movies had one thing right in their pre-emptive logic.
She looked at the empty streets. Looked at the windows, boarded up. She looked at the blood in the cracks of the road, and she could almost hear the screams that must’ve echoed out; she could almost smell the panic and the sweat, taste the rot.
And then she saw it.
The body.
The fallen body.
It wasn’t the first dead body she’d ever seen. She’d found her grandmother dead, sitting in her armchair, right when she was a little kid. She remembered how still she looked. How peaceful she looked. But also how inhuman she looked. Like something had left her. Like she was just a shell, and the host had long gone.
But this was different. Seeing this man’s body, torn apart at the side of the road, bullet hole between his eyes… it made Alison’s skin crawl, her stomach turn. Because it was the combination of factors that got to her. The lack of dignity. The street around her. The realisation that all the horrors she’d heard about, all the chaos she’d read about, all of it was true.
And then she saw the movement.
Right at the end of the street. Three of them.
She thought at first that they were just drunk men, something like that. Her mind wasn’t putting two and two together, wasn’t connecting the dots.
But the dots soon did connect.
The reality clicked into place.
“Hold up,” the commander said. “Looks like a few goons have decided to pay a special welcome.”
Alison had been expecting to feel fearful when she first came into contact with the infected. She’d been expecting horror to wash over her.
But this was different.
The feeling she felt, as she saw the torn Manchester United T-shirt, the baggy football shorts… as she saw the wedding rings clinging on to torn fingers… as she saw the piercings—all these fragments, remnants of a reality before, a life before…
She felt pity.
Especially when she saw their eyes.
The rest of them was something less than human. Their bodies were contorted. Their mouths let out the most ghastly, the most inhuman noises.
But the eyes.
The eyes still had a fragment of normality about them.
They glared at Alison like they could see her. Like they knew she was there.
And it was the eyes she looked into when she was ordered to lift her gun.
The eyes she looked into as she aimed for the head.
As she held her breath.
As she pulled her trigger.
She watched the bodies fall. And even though they were undead, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just taken a life.
Because she saw that one second, there was a spark in those eyes.
And in the next second, that spark had gone.
“Now come on,” the commander said, stepping over to the fallen bodies, smile on his face. “You’d better get used to that shit. That’s what you signed up for.”
As Alison walked over the fallen, looked down into their empty faces, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d made an enormous mistake.
That she wanted to get away from here.
But there was no turning back.
Only taking a deep breath.
Pushing forward.
On into the new world.
Because this was her home now.
This was her home, again.
Chapter Seven
Riley ran.
Anna ran.
Both of them ran as fast as they could, as hard as they could.
But for every step they took, all they could think about was Kesha.
All they could think about was where she’d gone.
Where she’d possibly gone.
Riley’s heart pounded. He looked at
the doors either side of him. Tried a few. But they were locked. All of them were locked.
There was no way Kesha could’ve staggered away on her own. But at the same time, there was no way she had stayed put. There was just no way.
Riley had looked. Anna had looked. They’d both looked, and they’d both drawn a blank.
Which could only mean one thing.
Someone had taken her. Someone had to have taken her.
They reached some stairs. Opened the doorway, clambered their way up the staircase. Then they stepped out onto the first floor, slammed the door behind them. They could only hope that the creatures wouldn’t follow them up here. That they would go some other way.
Because he and Anna needed time.
They needed time to make a decision about their next step.
They needed time to think.
“Where is she?” Anna shouted. “Where—where did she go?
Riley shook his head. Hearing Anna similarly puzzled where Kesha had gone to hit him too. Because he knew for certain that he hadn’t fucked up. He hadn’t just made some kind of mistake.
Kesha really was gone. She’d disappeared from sight.
“I mean, she—she was there. She was right there.”
“Someone must have taken her,” Riley said.
“But who? Who?”
Riley opened his mouth. Tried to speak. Tried to come up with some kind of theory. But he had nothing. Nothing at all.
“I mean did you see anyone?”
“Did I see anyone?”
“Yeah,” Anna said. “I mean, you were facing the corridor, weren’t you?”
“Don’t mind me,” Riley said. “I mean, I was kind of saying my goodbyes to you. I thought I was going to die. Remember that part?”
Anna nodded. She was shaky. As too was Riley. “I just don’t understand,” she said. “She can’t have just disappeared. She can’t have just… gone.”
Riley listened to the echoing footsteps downstairs. He listened to them racing their way up the stairway.
“No, she can’t,” he said. “Which means we’re going to have to look for her. We’re going to have to find her. We can’t just give up on her. But we don’t have a whole lot of time.”