Demise of the Living
Page 30
The pain licked through his body, tendrils of molten agony that erupted with every movement.
Colin heaved himself back on his elbows and kicked out with his feet. The pain bit deep. His chest and stomach burning from the massive wound, he tried to back up the stairs.
All hope of hiding or finding a weapon evaporated as the office door swung open.
Liz stood there, a camping lantern in one hand, the bloodied kitchen knife in the other.
“Are you going to kill him too, Ma?” Melissa asked just out of sight.
Billy’s dog was yapping excitedly somewhere out of sight.
Liz turned. “Just be a minute, honey.”
Colin seized his moment with Liz’s head turned and he sprang up. He hadn’t finished pushing himself upright when the pain slashed the strength from his muscles. He landed gasping at Liz’s feet.
“Calm down,” Liz said gently. “You’ll only make things worse.”
From his place crumpled on the floor, all Colin could see were Liz’s blood-stained court shoes.
“Why?” Colin said, burbling through the fluid in his throat.
“Simple mathematics, Colin,” Liz answered. “The less mouths to feed, the longer the supplies will last, and the quicker I got rid of you guys the more for me and Melissa.”
Colin’s eyebrows furrowed. He was either in pain or confused by the answer.
“I failed my son,” Liz said, crouching down beside Colin. “But I will do everything I can to keep my little girl alive.”
Sensing her close, Colin thrust out his hand to try to fend her off, but he only succeeded in smacking his knuckle against the camping lantern.
“This isn’t helping,” Liz chided. She glanced at Melissa standing in the doorway.
Colin lay there, his strength robbed from him by the gaping wound in his chest. He had no energy to fend Liz off.
“Quiet now,” Liz said in a soothing tone.
Colin knew he would be dead in a moment, either from the shotgun blast or Liz’s coup de grâce.
She placed the tip of the blade in front of Colin’s eye. A drip of blood was caught by the lantern, glossy and dark. It splashed onto Colin’s cheek.
He willed himself to resist, but his body refused to obey. It was then he realised he wasn’t even breathing.
Liz thrust the knife deep into Colin’s skull.
Chapter 21
House In Order
“It’s not fair to leave you like this,” Liz said to the twitching zombie. “I didn’t want to think that you were gone, but you are. The little boy I loved isn’t in there anymore, is he?”
Grant showed no signs of understanding. He merely fought against his bonds and tried to snarl behind the duct tape.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t keep you safe, Grant.”
Liz levelled the rifle at the squirming child and pulled the trigger.
The child dropped like a stone and lay still. For the first time in days the little boy wasn’t moving.
Liz took in a succession of deep breaths, trying to stifle the tears.
She put the gun down and rolled the dead boy into the waiting sleeping bag. He was lighter than she remembered.
She recalled how heavy Grant had felt when she had last carried him from the car fast asleep. He had become an impossible weight for her to carry.
She would have wanted nothing more than to hold him in her arms and kiss him goodnight one last time, but who knew how virulent the infection would be. Instead she zipped the sleeping bag up and pulled the drawstrings of the hood tight to veil his face.
She would be more gentle with this body. The sleeping bag-shrouded bodies of John and Karen she had unceremoniously dragged down the stairs and dumped just inside the office doors of the first floor.
Liz knew it would be a pain dragging all the supplies up to the fourth floor, but it would be a far easier task than trying to clean up after last night’s carnage.
She picked up the adult-sized sleeping bag. It felt half full with the delicate frame of her son inside.
She opened the door and saw Melissa was standing there.
“I thought I told you to go downstairs and move the camping equipment up here,” Liz said, angry that Melissa might have been watching.
“Ma, come quick. You have to see this,” Melissa said excitedly. She went running over to the window. “Ma, ma! You’ve got to see this!”
“Just coming, dear,” Liz said, gently lowering the sleeping bag she had been hauling.
She stood up and became aware of the rumbling noise and the burst of distant firecrackers.
“They’re leaving,” Melissa said, pointing down at the street.
The dog that had become so attached to Melissa over the past few days darted to and fro, imbued with the excitement radiating from the girl.
Liz looked of the window, and sure enough, the hordes of undead were shambling off down the street.
“Oh my,” was all Liz could say.
“Where do you think they’re going?” Melissa asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Liz answered.
“Should we try and leave, too?”
“I don’t know?” Liz said honestly.
She had never considered anything other than holding up in the office block, but Melissa had raised a valid point. Should they try to escape?
“What’s that noise?” Melissa asked.
Liz listened. The rumbling and the pops and bangs were getting closer.
“I don’t know,” Liz said as she stretched up to open the window.
The noise became crisp, more recognizable as gunshots.
“Look!” Liz said excitedly, pointing out of the window.
In the sky, a black dot swooped and hovered like a bird of prey hunting for food. As she watched, it became apparent this was no bird. A trail of fire tore free from its underside.
“It’s a helicopter,” Liz said in amazement.
There was a blast of gunfire from down the far end of the street and the deep mechanical rumbling grew louder still.
Suddenly a line of zombies fell to their feet, then eerily the sound of machine gun fire made its way to their ears.
A sandy-coloured tank trundled over the corpses and turned onto the street.
“Oh my God!” Liz squealed.
Behind the tank came a staggered line of soldiers, helmets and body armour on, rifles at the ready.
The helicopter with its black painted hull and ugly angled body swooped down the street. Its cannons gave a deafening roar and it cut a swathe of destruction before it.
Liz clamped her hands over Melissa’s young ears to protect her from the thunderous racket. Blow yelped excitedly at the noise outside.
Looking down at the path mowed clear of undead, Liz caught a glimpse of her car. It was practically torn through at the middle by the bullets.
Gunfire now erupted from down the road. Liz looked back to see the tank and two smaller armoured vehicles had taken up position along with the men. Although the chopper had obliterated many hundreds of walking dead, there was still a sizeable mob. Unconcerned by the ordnance raining in from above, the zombies staggered onwards to their living prey.
The formed-up troops opened fire. The crowd of zombies started to break and surge. Like waves crashing on a beach, the lead would peter out into nothing only to be replaced by the cresting undead behind.
Methodically ,the soldiers worked their way forward. As the procession drew level with them, Liz could see that there were support units in the rear: medics on hand with prominent red crosses and flanking troops dispatching any missed threats. Then squads of soldiers would disappear into the buildings overlooking the street.
“Have they come to rescue us?” Melissa asked.
“I think so,” Liz replied. “I think so."
Liz looked around the empty office.
“Quick, Melissa, run downstairs and grab an empty sleeping bag. Push it out of the window and wave it like a flag. You got that?”
Melissa nodded and ran off, the dog obediently scampering along with her.
Liz bent down and picked up her dead son. She swung his cocooned corpse over her shoulder and followed her daughter down to the first floor. The butt of the rifle slapped uncomfortably against her hip as she made her way down the stairs.
By the time she got there, Melissa was just standing on a table, getting herself ready to wave for attention.
“Good girl,” Liz praised.
She laid Grant’s shrouded body next to the other two and put her fist to her lips.
The gunshots outside were getting louder as the troops approached.
“Right, right,” Liz said to the dead bodies.
She dragged John’s heavy corpse over to Sharon’s ripped and blood-soaked tent. Pulling the shredded entry flap to one side, she could see Sharon’s dead body folded at the knees, half lying back on the camp bed. There was a gaping hole in her chest the size of a football. The raw pulped organs were still a bright crimson. A pool of slowly congealing blood filled the waterproof plastic floor of the tent. Liz unzipped the sleeping bag and rolled John over to lay face first on the blood-soaked ground sheet.
It had been an easy task dusting the leftovers in aspirin. John had unknowingly consumed enough to make him feel sick; not enough to kill him, but enough to make it easy to suffocate him with paper towels while everyone else was shouting out the windows at Stephen.
She walked over to Colin’s corpse and dragged it into the office from where he had died on the landing. Putting her grubby court shoe on his jaw, she pulled the kitchen knife out of his eye socket with a slurp. Some yellow-tinged fluid dripped from the tip of the blood-encrusted blade.
Liz walked back over to John’s body. She knelt down over the top of him and pulled his head back by his greasy hair. She slipped the knife under his chin and slid it across his neck. When she had drawn it the full length, she let go of his head, letting it fall back into the pool of blood with a splash.
“They’ve seen me!” Melissa called.
“That’s good, honey,” Liz said sweetly. “Let me know when they’re coming into the building.”
She grabbed the foot of Karen’s sleeping bag and dragged her back to her tent. Karen’s body was lighter and much more easily manipulated than John’s, with his rolls of flab. Liz unzipped the tent flap and hauled Karen’s dead body into the tent to lay her on the camp bed. She unzipped the sleeping bag slightly to expose her face. The skin had started to turn a greenish blue, not unlike some of the zombies outside. There was a lighter mark that spread from the mouth onto the right cheek. Liz held her left hand over the girl’s mouth at the same angle as the strange mark. It was the same size and shape as Liz’s hand.
Liz’s heart missed a beat. She’d had no idea the bruising from where she’d suffocated Karen would show up postmortem. If the mark had come up sooner or someone had checked the body more closely Liz realized she could have been caught.
“They’re almost here, Ma!” Melissa called.
“Okay,” Liz said, leaving Karen’s tent.
Standing in the centre of the office, Liz looked around. The place was a shambles now. Sharon’s tent was ripped and peppered with shotgun pellets. There were the bodies of Colin, Billy, and John clearly visible, sprawled on the blood-drenched carpet tiles. Liz looked down at the kitchen knife she’d used to kill Billy and Colin. For a moment she thought of wiping the handle clean. It wouldn’t take a forensics team long to work out what happened here.
She walked up to her daughter. She was still waving the sleeping bag from the window.
The street below was strewn with dead bodies. Thousands of them piled up like so much refuse. The advancing line of soldiers was firing furiously at the undead that were still being drawn to them.
Beyond the liberating troops, Liz could see pillars of smoke dotted around the horizon.
They may be about to be rescued from this office fortress, but she doubted the world outside would return to normal anytime soon.
And she doubted there would be a thorough investigation into what happened here.
“You can stop waving now. Come sit here,” Liz said softly. She reached out to hold Melissa’s hand. “Now, remember last night when you told me you were scared the murderer would kill you, too?”
Melissa nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“And I told you my big secret that I was the one murdering all the people,” Liz said in a calm and reassuring tone. “You remember why I told you I was killing them?”
Melissa nodded.
Liz placed a motherly arm around her daughter.
“I told you I was doing it to keep you and me safe. So we had enough food to eat and enough water to drink. So we could stay alive and stay together,” Liz said. She calmly stroked her daughter’s hair. “And I asked you to go and ask for a drink of water so I could finish making sure we were safe.”
“Uh-huh,” Melissa replied.
“Well, we need to do the same thing from now on. I promise to keep you safe, honey, for as long as I’m alive. Now you need to help me by promising to keep our secret.”
Melissa nodded silently.
“If anyone asks, you tell them Colin tried to kill us, okay?”
Melissa’s bottom lip trembled.
“What is it, honey?” Liz asked.
“But...but that’s a lie,” Melissa burbled out.
“I know, honey, but it’s okay to tell lies if it’s to protect the people you love. And if the soldiers find out I killed all these people, they won’t understand that I did it to protect you and they’ll take me away from you.” Liz looked Melissa in the eyes. “And you don’t want them to take me away from you, do you? Who would look after you?”
Melissa was crying, tears tumbling down her cheeks.
Liz smiled and wiped them away.
“It’s okay, Melissa. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.”
The End
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21