Ghostland_A Zombie apocalypse Novel

by Shaun Whittington

  “Were you dreaming?” he asked her.

  She shook her head and he knew that she was lying.

  “I’m sorry if you were, but if I leave you any longer, then you won’t sleep tonight.”

  “Daddy?” Imelda sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Tell me about when me and Tyler were born.”

  Simon smiled and was a little too jittery and impatient to be telling stories. “I’m not sure—”

  “Please.”

  His daughter looked at him with pleading eyes. How could he resist?

  “Okay,” he sighed, “but after that I need to check the outside of the house.”

  He sat next to Imelda and put his arm around her shoulder. He began, “When you were born—”

  “Start with Tyler,” she said. “Then me.”

  “When it was time for Tyler to be born, we went to hospital and seven hours later he popped out. Just like that. Well, popped is probably the wrong word; it was more difficult than that. He was eight pounds and seven ounces and I was the first person to touch him.”

  Simon paused and could feel his throat beginning to harden. He swallowed hard and continued, “We thought he would be our only child and then suddenly you came along.”

  “Was I a nice surprise?”

  “Of course.” Simon smiled, groaned and rubbed his hand over his face. “You were both nice surprises.”

  “Tyler always used to tease me and tell me that he was the favourite because he was the first to be born, and I was...” Imelda couldn’t find the words to finish her sentence.

  “You were both special babies,” said Simon.

  Simon didn’t want to tell Imelda the truth. Why do that now?

  She said, “Daddy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  Simon kissed his daughter on the head and sniffed her hair. “You mean the world to me. You are my world.”

  A rattling could be heard from outside, making Imelda gasp.

  “It’s okay.” Simon stood up, trying to act in control, but he couldn’t hide the fact that he looked panicky.

  “What is it, daddy?” Imelda stood to her feet and wrapped her arms around Simon’s waist.

  “It’s probably just another dog, an animal or ... or the wind.” He turned so that he was facing his daughter and said, “I want you to go upstairs and hide under the bed, just in case.”

  “Not again.”

  “Please,” Simon begged. “Just do as you’re told.”

  “But daddy,” she cried, “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “Just do it. And don’t move from under that bed until you hear my voice tell you to. Understand?”

  Imelda glared at her father and remained motionless.

  “Understand?” he tried again.

  She nodded the once.

  “Right, go upstairs. I’ll call you once I’m done checking outdoors.”

  She gave her dad a hug, and then headed for the stairs and went up to the first floor with reluctant feet. He could hear footsteps above him, telling him that she was now in the room. He went in the kitchen and took his knife and the claw hammer from the side. He placed the hammer in his deep pocket and held onto the knife. He placed his hand on the bolt of the door, ready to slide it back, and took a long intake of breath.

  He slid the bolt and slowly opened the door. He shut the door behind him and was aware that he couldn’t venture far. The door was unlocked and could only be locked from the inside because the bolt was all there was. He made a decision to walk round the house, and then head straight back in.

  As soon as he approached the first corner of the house, he was grabbed and thrown to the floor. Simon dropped his knife and was kicked in his side as he tried to get to his feet. He looked up and could see it was the same man by the pond. His face was badly scarred from the cut, but wasn’t bleeding anymore, and he bent down and picked up the steak knife that Simon had dropped, and a wide beam stretched across his face.

  Simon took another kick and groaned, now coughing hard and unable to find his breath.

  “You should have taken me in,” the man with the grey ponytail growled.

  Simon reached inside his pocket and pulled out the hammer as his assailant, now holding Simon’s steak knife, brought his leg back to kick Simon once again.

  Simon took another kick to his side, but grabbed a hold of the leg and wrapped his left arm around. Aware that the man now had a blade, Simon began hitting the hammer against the man’s right knee. The assailant screamed out and fell, clutching his knee, and Simon scrambled to his feet and struck the man again. He aimed for the head, but he missed and struck the man on the top of his shoulder.

  He wanted to kill him.

  Fuck it. He knew this day was going to come one day and he had the safety of Imelda to think of. If this man was quite willing to kill another human being to get a roof over his head and whatever supplies were in there, what could he do to Imelda? It wouldn’t bear thinking about.

  Simon tried to hit the man once more, but his attacker stabbed him in the hand. The knife didn’t go in far, half a centimetre at the most, but it was enough to make Simon yell and drop the hammer. He took a step back and was now clutching onto his bleeding left palm.

  The attacker grabbed the hammer and stood up. He was now holding the knife in his right and the hammer in his left, smiling devilishly, like a clown.

  Simon ran towards the door of the house, trying to escape, but felt the hammer hit him in the back, making him collapse to the floor.

  The man with the grey haired ponytail bent down and looked down at Simon who was now on his back, gasping for breath.

  The stranger growled, “Don’t worry, son. I’ll make this very quick.”

  The man then gasped, stood up straight and had a look of confusion on his face, making Simon equally as confused. The man dropped the knife and hammer at the same time, then fell to his knees. Simon could now see another man standing behind the pond guy, blood running off of his trench knife.

  It took Simon a while to realise that the pond guy had been stabbed by the other stranger from behind. The man with the grey ponytail fell to his side, gasping for air, and Simon stood up and took a few steps back as the man by the pond continued to gasp.

  For reasons he didn’t understand, Simon never turned away when the man behind bent down and dragged the blade of the trench knife across the front of the pond guy’s neck to finish him off.

  Blood gushed out of the pond man’s throat and the killer stared over at Simon and said, “Hello again, Simon.”

  Simon nodded once. “Hello, Dicko.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Simon had told Dicko to come inside the house. Dicko had saved his life, so it was the least he could do.

  Dicko told Simon that he’d be with him in a few minutes and that he needed to move the body in case the ‘little one’ saw it. Simon knew he was referring to his daughter and thanked Dicko for his considerate behaviour. Dicko had given the man from the pond a brutal death, but it was either Simon or him.

  Dicko had stepped inside the house and could see that Simon was nowhere to be seen. He then returned from upstairs with his little girl, both entering the living room, and both father and daughter sat on the couch.

  Imelda gasped when she saw Dicko, but Simon told her that the stranger was okay and had ‘helped’ daddy, but never went into detail how.

  Simon felt relaxed around Dicko this time round, despite witnessing what he was capable of, and offered him a drink of water.

  They talked and Dicko tried to explain to Simon about his recent past.

  “I’ve been staying in a wooded bit. I saw that guy heading to your farm, so I went to the side of the fields and kind of followed him,” he said. “I didn’t know he was a danger until you two started to fight.”

  Simon admitted, “I had a confrontation with him before.”

  Dicko sat back and clasped his hands together. “Oh?”

  “He wouldn’t leave us alone, s
o I lashed out.” Simon took in a deep breath and continued, “There was a little tussle between the pair of us and I slashed his face, albeit accidentally.”

  “You have a daughter to protect.” Dicko nodded. “You did what you had to do. You also need to think about yourself. If anything happens to you, she’s gonna suffer being on her own.”

  “I know.” Simon huffed and felt uncomfortable talking like this in front of his little girl. He went into the kitchen and gave her some blackcurrant juice and asked her to go upstairs for a while.

  She nodded and smiled, and surprisingly went back upstairs without protesting, knowing that the two men wanted to talk about grown up stuff. Her and Tyler used to get asked to go upstairs once in a while if ever her mummy and daddy needed to talk or argue about something.

  “She’s a sweet girl, beautiful,” Dicko remarked. “I take it you want to know my story, but you don’t want her to hear it. You don’t want her scared.”

  Simon nodded. “That’s right.”

  “I get it.” Dicko laughed softly and added, “But there’s nothing to tell. I’m just a guy that just so happens to be still around.”

  Simon took an intake of breath and asked his guest, “What did you kill that man with?”

  Dicko smiled and stroked his dark beard. “This,” he said. From the brown leather holster on his left, he took his right hand and whipped out a six-inch blade with a D-shaped knuckle skullcrusher. “This is Trevor. I never leave home without it.”

  “So, what’s your story?”

  Dicko smiled and placed the knife back into the holster. “What’s yours?”

  “You’re my guest, and I asked first.”

  “And like I said earlier … my story is very dull, very boring.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  Dicko smiled and shook his head. “I am your guest. I’m not your prisoner, so I don’t feel compelled to answer your question. And let’s not forget that I saved your life.”

  “What’s wrong, mate?”

  “There’s nothing wrong.” Dicko sat back in the chair and placed his arms on the rest, looking more than comfortable. He said, “The past is the past. What matters is now.”

  “But didn’t you have a wife ... or children?” Simon didn’t understand why his guest was being so secretive. “Who did you lose?”

  “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Dicko bit his bottom lip and added, “Talking about the dead cannot bring them back.”

  “If you don’t talk about your story, then I won’t be giving any secrets away.”

  “Good,” Dicko began to snicker, “because I don’t think the old life is important anymore. Talking about the old life is pointless.”

  “It’s important to me. It’s important to Imelda. Am I just supposed to forget about my wife and my son?”

  “So you had a wife and a son?” Dicko rubbed his chin and added, “I thought you weren’t going to tell me anything. What happened? How did they...?”

  “Doesn’t matter now.”

  “How did you get up here?” Dicko asked.

  “What do you mean?” Simon seemed baffled by Dicko’s query.

  “You’re not from around these parts. You’re from the south.”

  Dicko sighed, “Okay. If you don’t want to talk about yourself, that’s fine. I’ve got no problem with it. But I’ll tell you what me and my daughter have been through.”

  Dicko glared at Simon, waiting for him to start.

  “I moved up here when I was in my twenties. Me and a pal of mine went to Turkey for two weeks and I met this girl. We kept in contact and she eventually moved down to where I stayed for eighteen months.”

  “Why just eighteen months?” asked Dicko.

  “She couldn’t settle. She had a big family and she was missing them, so I quit my job as a forklift driver, applied to some colleges up here, near where she stayed, and managed to get in one. Then the pair of us moved up, got married, had kids, blah, blah, blah.”

  “And you lived happily ever after,” Paul said with a smile. “Until the dead arrived.”

  “The Canavars.” Simon nodded.

  “That’s what they seem to call them around these parts.”

  “So you’re not from around here either?”

  Dicko shook his head. “I’m many miles from home. I’ve heard many names for these creatures since this thing has started, but I simply call them the dead.”

  Simon released a sad breath out and shook his head. “I can’t believe how quickly it spread. I mean, what was our army doing, for Christ’s sake?”

  Dicko could see Simon getting worked up and said, “Those questions are pointless now. They’re the questions that we asked ourselves during the period when the dead were here in their thousands.”

  “Me and my daughter call it Stage One.”

  Dicko smiled and nodded the once. “And I take it when the bombs fell...”

  “That’s Stage Two.”

  “Of course it is,” said Dicko. “I never witnessed any bombing myself. I came from a village and was there for months after the announcement. I think the cities and some large towns were bombed, to reduce the dead population, but I didn’t even know places had been bombed until I was told by someone.”

  “Why did you leave this village of yours?”

  “I had no choice,” said Dicko and his face developed into a sombre one. “It was a shame. I left a few friends behind.”

  Simon opened his mouth to ask more about the stranger’s past, but decided not to push him too far. He had got more out of him than he thought he could.

  Dicko ran his fingers through his dark greasy hair and had a look around the living room. “You certainly hit it lucky finding this place.”

  “We did,” Simon agreed. “Not before time. We had spent most of our time going from one place to the next. The woods, fields and a garage. We had spent the night in a shed before we came across this place.”

  “And that little thing upstairs...” Dicko said, followed by a thin and sympathetic smile. “How’s she coping?”

  “Better than you’d think for an eight-year-old, but she has her wobbles.”

  “A shame. She must be missing her mum and...”

  “I had a son called Tyler. They were both taken at the same time, mother and son.”

  Dicko lowered his head and said, “I’m sorry.”

  Simon could feel a dull sensation in his chest and could feel it moving up to his throat. He was beginning to feel numb and tried to get rid of the feeling by clearing his throat very loudly.

  He said, “What’s been happening...” He cleared his throat once more and tried again. “What’s been happening over the last year has been beyond surreal. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a dream.”

  Dicko smiled. “I suppose that’s understandable.”

  “I just don’t know how long we can carry on like this.” Simon looked crestfallen and put his hands behind his head. “I just wonder how the other countries have suffered across the globe.”

  “I think they’ve suffered, but the colder countries have probably got an advantage. The dead are slow as it is, without having to wade through inches of snow, or trying to balance on a sheet of ice.”

  “I just don’t understand how a country, the world, could come to a halt from things that are so slow. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Dicko nodded in agreement with Simon and could understand his frustration. “It’s quite simple when you put your mind to it.”

  “Simple? How?”

  “Think about it,” Dicko began. “After just three weeks trade had stopped. Now, once petrol stops being delivered to supermarkets, other dominoes start to fall. Even gas stations that we get fuel from have to be replenished twice a day. After three or four weeks, due to staff shortages, power stations start to fail. We then lose power. ATM machines stop working, but the shelves are empty anyway in the shops, so we resort to robbing to feed our families. Then the water stops running and the toilets stop working. Eventually peo
ple start dying from cholera, starvation...”

  Simon grunted, “Well, I suppose when you put it like that…”

  “Daddy?”

  Both men turned in the direction of the opened door that was situated near the main door and the bottom of the stairs. Imelda was standing by the door and looked concerned.

  Simon beckoned her over. “What is it, babe?”

  “I was scared, being up there on my own.”

  “Of course you were.” He beckoned her over. “Come here.”

  She walked over to her dad and sat on his lap. She lay down, resting her head on his chest. Dicko smiled and seemed touched by what he saw. Simon observed this, and was certain that Dicko had had a family once upon a time.

  Imelda whispered to her daddy, “When is that man leaving?”

  Dicko had overheard the pretty little thing and began to laugh.

  “We were just talking,” said Simon. “In fact, I was going to ask him to stay for something to eat. What do you think about that?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Okay.”

  Simon looked over at Dicko. “Is that okay for you, mate?”

  Dicko nodded. “I’d be honoured.”

  “Good,” said Simon. “I hope you like leftover dog.”

  *

  After an hour of more chat and some nibbles, Dicko excused himself from the table in the living room. Before Simon could ask the man where he was going, Dicko gave the man a wink and told him that he had stuff to sort out outside. He had moved the body earlier, but wanted to make sure it was completely out of sight.

  Simon nodded and thanked the man, knowing that he was getting rid of the body. He didn’t know how he was going to do it, though. Was he going to bury the body? Or put it in the empty barn? As far as Simon was aware, the man didn’t have a shovel on him. Hide it? But where? Under one of the trees or in the small barn?

  Simon and Imelda had exchanged no words in Dicko’s absence, and once they had finished their meal, Dicko had returned. He had only been away for seven or eight minutes and sat back down at the table. Simon didn’t ask the man where he had put the body, but thanked him by gesturing with his head, and then asked what his plans were.