by James King
ZOMBIE SURVIVAL
BY
JAMES KING
PROLOGUE
The stench of fear burned in the air. It seethed like a physical force in the room between the three people. They stood by the window, peering out between half opened curtains at the scene that lay beyond. The room was just an ordinary living room in an ordinary suburban house in an ordinary town. And the scene outside was nothing more than an ordinary suburban driveway. Yet it might as well have been a portal into Hell itself.
“How many of them are there out there?” The person who had spoken was a man, somewhere in his twenties. He had thick black curly hair, and a slender, pallid face that was usually handsome, but was now stained deep with fear. “How many?” he asked again.
The two other people in the room - a man and a woman – looked back toward the man who had spoken. They were standing by the window, and the other man had the curtain slightly opened and had been peering through it. Now he looked back into the room, daylight spilling across his features, painting shadows in the hollows of his face. But it was more than an absence of light that his face was shadowed with. Like the other man, he too was tarnished with fear.
“Enough...” the man by the window said, “a few dozen probably. Just like there always are. It’s not going to get any better you know Shaun.”
Shaun nodded, licked his lips. He soon withdrew his tongue into his mouth. He didn’t like the way his lips tasted. They tasted dry, salty, like cured meat. Like meat that could be eaten...
“Okay,” said Shaun, “...alright... a few dozen you say. Not too many then...” and he uttered a strangled laugh, “not like they’re going to a problem at all really, is it Dave?”
Dave sighed. It was meant to be a resigned, world-weary sound. Instead, it just sounded frightened. “What are you saying then Shaun? That we shouldn’t try this? That we should stay here for – what? Another day? Another week? Maybe two weeks? Hell, how about a month – or maybe for the rest of our lives, assuming that our lives are going to last any longer than a month? Is that what you’re saying?
Shaun nodded, fought the urge to lick his lips again and just about won, “yeah... yeah Dave. Maybe that’s what I’m saying. Something along those lines...”
“No!”
The word was emphatic, almost shouted. Both Shaun and Dave looked away from each other and toward the person who had just spoken. The woman stood at the opposite side of the window to where Dave stood. Like the two men, her face was a pale streak of fear: her eyes large, hungry, and haunted by all that she had seen. Her hair was long and auburn, and it lay in unwashed streaks against her brow and cheeks.
“Jenny...?” Dave asked gently.
“No...” she said again, and this time the word was softer, breathed, almost a whisper. Then she said, “...if we stay here any longer then we die. You know that Dave. You know that too Shaun,” she flicked her gaze toward the other man, and then quickly back to Dave. “Even if... if they don’t get us, we’ll run out of food, probably by the end of today. And then what? What do we eat? Each other?”
Jenny offered laughter, but it sounded like a scream. It was a bad joke. A horrible joke. Sometimes they found themselves making such horrible jokes. Sometimes it was the only way that they could stay sane. Or at least keep their insanity in check.
“We’ve got to get out of here...” she said at last, and again she was almost whispering, as though afraid that someone might overhear, “...somewhere away. Out of the town. Find food. Safety... somewhere.”
“Where though, Jenny?” asked Shaun, his bugging eyes peering first to Jenny, then to Dave, and then back to Jenny again, “where is going to be safe? Where in this fucked up world is anything ever going to be safe?”
“I don’t know!” she hissed the words in a kind of bitter fury, “...I don’t know, Shaun. Just away. Away from here. Away from this terrible place.”
Shaun looked back to Dave, “...Dave? Come on, man... I mean really? Out there?”
Dave looked away from Shaun and back outside. He squinted into the daylight. He drew a deep and shuddery breath. Then he said, “Jenny’s right. We’ve got to do it, Shaun. And it is doable. Dangerous, but doable. And the car is only a few meters down the driveway. It would take seconds to get to it. Then we just start her up, press the accelerator and raise the clutch... and God help anything that gets in our way.”
“If you’re right about having left the keys in the car...” said Shaun.
“I did leave the keys in it, Shaun,” Dave replied, “I’m sure of it...”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, damn it, I’m sure.”
“But what if they’re not there?” said Shaun, “what then?”
“Then we come back to the house, of course,” Dave replied.
Shaun snorted derisive laughter, “come back to the house? Yeah, sure. We’ll have about fifty of them around us by then. As soon as they hear the front door open they’ll be headed in our direction. We’ll have bare seconds to get from the house to the car. And then - ,”
“Well what do you suggest then, Shaun!” Dave shouted, suddenly angry, “– that we stay in here and starve?!”
“Shhhhh!” Jenny whispered, “don’t shout – they’ll hear you!”
That sobered Dave. It sobered them all. And at the mere mention of them, they all looked toward the window. Shaun stepped forward, nudging in between Dave and Jenny, and he peered through the glass. He gazed at the garden, at the driveway, at the car parked on the driveway, at the roadway beyond, and at the other houses beyond that. A perfectly normal everyday suburban scene... if it wasn’t for them...
They wandered around, seemingly aimlessly. Some were almost fresh, looking just like sleepwalkers who might at any moment snap out of their trance. But others were excessively rotted: their skin green, their eyes sunken into their head, their mouths a grinning mockery of teeth, their bodies withered scarecrow forms beneath the ragged remnants of their clothes.
But worse of all – and perhaps most relevant to the three people in the room who peered out at them – were the red smears that besmirched many of their mouths. Some of these smears were fresh, wet and glistening beneath in the morning sun. Other of these smears were older, dried, become like brown rust on their icy skin. But these smears all told of one thing.
Feeding.
Eating.
Rending, ravening, devouring...
The red smears about their mouths were traces of human blood: the last remnants of a kill that had been either recent or long ago.
“Come on...” said Jenny, breaking the trance that all three of them seemed to have sunk into as they gazed through the window: and her voice was cold, icy, “...we go now.”
She turned away from the window and strode toward the living room door.
“Huh, Jenny...?” said Dave, “what – now?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached the living room door, flung it open and strode through into the hall.
Dave looked and Shaun and Shaun looked at Dave. And then they both said the same word together.
“Shit...”
Both men left the window – the curtain flapping back down into place – and hurried across to the door. They piled through it into the hall, and there was Jenny, stood by the front door. They had each left a rucksack in the hall, packed with various provisions that they would need when they made their escape. As the two men entered the hall, Jenny was swinging her rucksack onto her back.
“Jenny...” said Dave, his tone weak, uncertain.
“We’ve got to get out of here, Dave,” said Jenny as she adjusted the straps of the rucksack.
“Yes, but – now? Are you sure that this is the right time?”
“There’s never going to be a right time Dave,” she replied, “there’s only ever going to be a wrong time. A really, really wrong time. And it’s now. I’m going. And if you’re not with me when I get into the car then I’ll be going without you. I’ll have no choice.”
Dave and Shaun exchanged glances. She’s right, the glance said. And terror burned through them.
There came the harsh sound of turning and pulling. Dave glanced around in time to see Jenny pulling open the front door. It was enough to spur him into action. He lunged forward, grabbed up his rucksack and hastily wrestled it onto his back. Shaun did the same. Then they turned toward the front door. Jenny had just stepped through it, so they raced after her.
And then they were outside. For the first time in days, possibly in weeks, they drew in fresh air, and had the high wide sky above their heads rather than a plaster ceiling.
And they felt exposed and threatened as they never had done before.
Because as soon as they left the front door and the protective confines of the house, the dead looked around. And their staring eyes fixed upon the two men and one woman, desperately fleeing down the driveway to the car.
As soon as Dave left the house, he heard them. Their low, senile, godless moaning that rose in the morning air like a dead wind soughing over a thousand broken tombstones. And he could smell them too: a ripe, sickening stench that tainted the air like a wound in flesh, and made breathing itself a laboured gagging trauma. But worse of all was the sight of them. Their bent, crooked, shambling figures, their cold hanging flesh, the maggots that writhed in eye sockets, nose-holes, mouths, remnants of hair. Their jaws fell down upon their chests and drooled hot and unnatural saliva that was the signature of their hunger. And the very fact that these figures – walking, shambling, groaning, hungering – were dead... it was obscene beyond belief.
...and then Dave reached the car. He fell against its cold hard side with a small whimper of terror and desperation, and then groped toward the handle. For one agonising moment, he couldn’t, for some reason, seem to get a grip on the handle; it kept slithering through his fingers and clattering uselessly against the side of the door. Then, with a slow dawning horror, he began to think that maybe the door was locked, and that the keys weren’t in the car at all, but were somewhere in the house – or maybe the keys were in the car, but the car had somehow been locked with them still inside it, or –
- he glanced wildly behind, and saw that they were coming now. He, Shaun, and Jenny had been seen, the moaning call had gone up, the acknowledgment of an imminent feast, and they were converging. In their dozens, perhaps even in their hundreds, a mass of blackened death that yet lived and lusted for weird sustenance. Their crooked hands groped outward, claw-like, seeking to rend, to claw the first wounds that would become a rising feast of blood.
Dave groped yet harder at the car door handle, felt sweat surge across his brow, down his back, while terror tasted like a lump of iron in his mouth.
And then at last the door popped open. Almost screaming with relief, Dave dumped himself into the car seat, snatched the door closed, and locked it. He wrestled his rucksack off and threw it in the back. Then he groped beneath the steering wheel to where the ignition was, praying that his hand would close around a bunch of keys that he could twist, fire the engine into life, and then get the sweet fuck out of here.
But when his fingers touched the ignition, he found it to be empty.
“Fuck!” he screamed, leaning forward and peering beneath the steering wheel. There was the ignition sure enough, but no keys hung from it. Instead, the black empty slit of the ignition merely peered back at him like a cruel, feline eye.
“Oh FUCK!” Dave screamed again, pounding the steering wheel with his fist.
“What...?” asked Jenny beside him, “...what!?”
“The keys...” Dave jabbed his finger toward the ignition. Then he peered around. Jenny was sitting next to him in the front passenger seat, while Shaun was in the back, leaning over the front seat and peering toward the dashboard of the car, his eyes wide and as large as poached eggs.
Meanwhile, beyond the windscreen, and the side windows of the car, other faces were appearing...
“What about the keys...?” asked Jenny, her voice whispered, desperate, “Dave... what are you telling me about the keys...?”
He paused for a minute, groping again beneath the steering wheel, barely able to believe that the keys weren’t there, that his memory could have played him so false.
“They’re...” he began, and then looked back around at Jenny, “...they’re not there...”
“What are you telling me, Dave...” she whispered, then, almost screaming, “what the fuck are you telling me...?!”
“Oh shit!” said Shaun, leaning back in his chair and covering his face with his hands, as though such an action could make it all just go away, “...oh bloody hell...!”
And faces... crowding around the car windows, hands clawing at the glass, damp hands, rotted hands, fingers that left rotted trails of slime behind them as though some particularly sickly slug had passed that way.
“You said...” Jenny began, “...you said, Dave that the keys were in here. That you were sure the keys were in here...”
“I was, damn it, I was!” Dave replied, peering again at the cruel mechanical eye of the ignition, and then down lower into the footwell, into the shadows below the pedals, which once again were curiously devoid of any keys.
“I was sure that...” Dave began, but then a memory struck him. It was a memory that came from just before the nightmare had descended, before the people had emerged in the autumn streets, rotting, stinking, diseased and famished. Dave had gone out to the car, nonchalantly, as though without a care in the world. Putting some maps into the glove compartment in lieu of a trip out into the countryside, (Dave had always been somewhat old school, and preferred old fashioned maps to Sat Nav). One of the maps had jammed as he tried to stick it in the glove compartment, so he’d needed both hands free to deal with it, and he’d been holding the car keys at the time, and so he’d put them down somewhere, he’d put them down, and fitted the maps in, and closed the glove compartment – and that was when he’d heard screaming, loud and desperate screaming coming from down the street, and he’d got out of the car, thoughtlessly closing the car door behind him - and there, down the street, had been one man eating another... and that had been enough to make him forget about the keys, the keys, the goddamn keys were in –
Dave’s hand shot out. He raked the glove compartment open and groped within it. There were those damned maps, the cause of so much trouble. He snatched them out, tossed them to one side, peered closer into the glove compartment, and there, sure enough... were the keys.
Laughing, almost mad with joy, Dave snatched the keys out of the compartment. He held them up for the others to see in a bright and jangling bunch. Jenny and Shaun joined him in his mad laughter, their eyes glinting with a kind of dreadful lunacy.
“Keys...!” Jenny cried, “keeeyyyyyyssss!”
“Keys!” Shaun also cried from the back, “ah man, stick those keys in that ignition and fire this fucker up!”
With a desperate, trembling hand, Dave aimed the key at the ignition. For a moment he couldn’t get it in, metal chattering on metal as he tried desperately to insert the key. And this is where I find that I’ve got the wrong fucking bunch of keys, Dave suddenly thought, and a sharp, hot, and dreadful lance of dread skewered him.
But they were the right bunch of keys. The key slotted home, he twisted it, and the car roared to life like some beast that has been too long asleep. Whoops of joy went up in the interior of the car, Shaun’s hand slapping Dave on the back, as though he were a striker who’d just scored a goal for the team. Meanwhile, the faces beyond the window peered and groped, and the vehicle rocked as their numbers mounted against it.
“Come on Dave,” said Jenn
y, let’s get the sweet hell out of here, please.”
Slowly, feeling oddly like a learner driver on his first lesson, Dave pressed the accelerator, and brought the clutch up. Gradually, the car began to nudge forward. Well I suppose that this is a driving lesson of sorts, Dave thought, today we’re going to learn how to drive through a crowd of the living dead.
He had very much hoped that once the car was in motion, the crowd would disperse, to one side and then the other, respectful of the greater speed and power of the vehicle. They didn’t though. Instead, they stood rooted to the spot, some even pressing their bodies tighter against the car as though they sought to halt the vehicle’s progress. Hands groped at the windscreen and side windows, while faces peered through and squashed against the glass. Blank faces, rotting faces: faces that moaned and slobbered and left their slime behind them. Faces of the dead...
Slowly, but with mounting speed, the car began to nudge its way forward. With all the bodies in the way, Dave couldn’t see exactly where the car was heading – he hoped that it was toward the end of the driveway rather than the garden wall. He was pretty sure that they were heading in the direction of the roadway – he’d reversed the car onto the driveway – but then, he’d been convinced that he’d left the keys in the ignition, so who knew?
“Come on Dave, faster please!” Jenny cried from the passenger seat beside him.
Faster? Yes, why not? Faster was good, faster meant that they’d get out of this hell hole all the sooner. Indeed, thought Dave, let’s go faster. Revving the engine, he brought the clutch up fast – too fast, almost stalling the car. But the engine held good, and the car lurched forward. The zombies, (ah, damn, Dave had been trying his best not to use that word, but now there it was, he’d used it), fell to either side of the car like skittles before a bowling ball. The car bumped and jounced as it went over them, and there came the sickening sound of crunching, bursting, and squashing as the weight of the vehicle was brought to bear upon weak flesh and bone. Dead flesh and bone – Dave told himself, and it was true, but it didn’t make it any easier, didn’t make the sound of mashing flesh and snapping bone any less sickening.