I reorganised myself so I held the crowbar and gas lamp in my left hand and my knife, at Max’s throat, with my right. Max turned the door handle and I pushed the door open with my right shoulder so Max and Kay could go through ahead of me. I closed the door, careful not to make any noise and took my position back beside Max. Despite having Kay hanging around his neck, Max did his best to swagger along the hallway to the stairway and he headed down, towards the basement. I noticed his eyes flicking constantly in my direction and I had the feeling I was being sized up.
We walked along a narrow corridor. I held the gas lamp up, level with my shoulder, and saw the corridor was lined with closely spaced doors painted in pale green. Each door was numbered, the numbers corresponding, I guessed, to the flats above and probably housed small store rooms. We turned right at the end, into another corridor with more of the same. Max stopped outside a door halfway down on the left. This door had no number on it and had a few metres more space on the right between it and the next door along. Max fiddled with the keys and selected a small brass one with a piece of red tape on it. He slid it into the lock and turned it, while I lowered my knife and used that hand to turn the handle. I shoved the door open with my right shoulder. ‘Inside,’ I said to Max and he shot me a look of disdain as Kay bundled him into the room ahead of her.
As I followed them inside, I held the gas lamp out before me and saw we were in a small storeroom, old boxes piled up in the corners, some broken furniture. And in the centre of the room, tied to a chair with rope, his chest bare and a piece of duck tape over his mouth, sat Sean. His eyes were closed and his head hung to the side. I noticed the gash on his forehead he’d sustained in the car crash had reopened and it oozed blood; I couldn’t tell where it ended and the fresh cuts he had gained since being here began. His right eye was swollen and surrounded by a vivid black and purple bruise. Blood ran down his chest from cuts on his body.
I put the back of the hand holding my knife to my mouth in an attempt to stifle my shock.
‘The fucking bastards!’ said Kay. Sean’s eyes shot open and he lifted his head, his eyes widening for a moment as they flicked between me and Kay, before he gave a slightest nod of his head in my direction.
Kay released Max and made a move to Sean. ‘Watch him,’ I said, halting her and I pointed my knife towards Max. With Kay holding her axe to Max’s throat, I darted forwards, crouched down and placed the gas lamp and crowbar on the floor at Sean’s feet. I used my knife to cut the rope around his left ankle.
‘You’re making a big mistake,’ said Max.
‘Shut up,’ I said without turning around.
‘Sophie, the bloke’s a low life fucking murderer,’ Max continued.
‘I said, shut up!’ I cut through the rope around his right ankle, then I stood to free his wrists. Finally, I pulled off the duck tape, revealing a swollen and busted lip underneath. Sean yelped as the tape ripped the skin open a little further.
‘Took your time,’ he croaked. He attempted a smile but winced.
‘And you can shut it too,’ I said. I spotted Sean’s t-shirt and coat in a bundle on the floor, picked them up and tossed them to him, where they landed across his lap. I stooped and snatched up the gas lamp, and turned to Max, pointing my knife level with his throat. ‘You, stay here,’ I said, side stepping around him so that eventually my back faced the door. Kay lowered her axe and darted over to Sean. She helped him into his t-shirt and coat before sliding her arm around his waist. But before he let her help him to his feet, Sean learned forwards and swiped the crowbar off the floor. With Kay’s help, the pair of them edged across the room towards me.
Max didn’t move. ‘We were wrong about you,’ he said to me, shaking his head. ‘You’re a fucking psycho.’
‘Whatever,’ I said and I passed the gas lamp into the hand that held the knife and thrust my free hand out to Max, palm up. ‘Give me the keys,’ I said.
Max didn’t move.
‘Keys!’
Max shook his head slowly, before leaning forwards and slamming the keys into the palm of my hand. Kay had already supported Sean through the door and I backed out of the room. I shut and locked the door, and shoved the keys into my pocket. Max began shouting and pounding on the back of the door straight away. I jogged on ahead, down the corridor, while Kay and Sean staggered behind me, trying to keep up. Around the corner I ran into Josh, his wide eyes staring at me from a mop of straggly black hair. We stared at each other for a moment, each one trying to work out the social etiquette of this awkward situation. As Josh’s expression of shock morphed into a grimace of anger, Sean lunged forwards and punched him in the jaw. Josh hit the floor and the three of us staggered down the corridor, up the steps and out of the building.
No time for unlocking and relocking the gate out onto the street. I climbed over it, pausing to retrieve the keys to the building from my pocket and toss them over the gate and into the car park. Kay practically threw Sean over the gate and sprang over it herself and we ran together, down through The Durlocks and down to the harbour. Sean hobbled and struggled to keep up with me. Kay didn’t leave his side.
‘This way,’ said Sean and he pointed up the Old High Street. I had switched off the gas lamp so as not to draw attention to ourselves, but I held onto it as we scarpered up the street, into town. At the top of Rendezvous Street, we turned right, then on until we reached the main road, over the road and down one of the streets off it. I worried how much longer Sean could manage, when he stopped in front of a three story town house in a part of town I wasn’t familiar with. ‘Home sweet home,’ he croaked.
Once inside, I relit the gas lamp and saw what was once a nice family home but what was now a dusty, dank and filthy hideout. Food wrappers and the trashed belongings of the former occupants littered the floor. Sean staggered through to the living room and Kay helped him lay down on the brown leather sofa, after sweeping empty beer cans onto the floor with her left arm. I sat on an armchair, deflated. It dawned on me that until we cleared Sean’s name and found the murderer me and Kay couldn’t go back to our camp … to Misfit.
We had become fugitives.
Entry Twelve
I watched Kay dabbing Sean’s wounds with cotton wool and some disinfectant she found in the bathroom cabinet. I moved forwards so that I perched on the edge of the armchair. ‘I think it’s time you told us what’s going on, Sean,’ I said, rolling a cigarette. I looked at the small amount of baccy left in the pouch and screwed up my nose, thinking of all the tobacco and packets of cigs I’d left behind at the camp. But if I had it on me, I’d swap all of it if I could have Misfit here.
‘I’ve been accused of a murder I didn’t commit,’ he said.
‘Yep, I got that. And the fact that me and Kay have risked our necks breaking you out means we believe you. But why didn’t you just tell the St Andrews lot the truth?’ I said. ‘We believed you, they probably –’
‘They didn’t exactly give me the chance to explain before they beat the crap out of me. As far as they were concerned they had their man.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said, horrified. ‘Chris wouldn’t –’
‘It wasn’t the red headed one. Just that one I punched when you broke me out of that place.’
‘Josh,’ I said.
‘Yeah, him and the one with the shaved head and big nose.’
‘Max?’
‘Whatever his name is. The red head said I deserved a fair trial. Max and Josh said they’d question me but instead they tortured me with my mouth gagged. I heard them say they were going to kill me and tell the others it was self defence. They just wanted to make me suffer first.’
‘No fucking way,’ said Kay.
‘OK, gag’s off now and we’re listening. You need to tell us everything if we’re going to help you,’ I said, putting the cigarette in my mouth and lighting it.
‘It was my sister,’ Sean said slowly, his voice low.
‘Your sister?’ said Kay, sitting back on the floor
beside the sofa and looking at him.
‘Yep.’
‘Your sister murdered Lucy?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Details,’ said Kay.
‘Look, my sister killed that girl. I couldn’t stop it … I tried but there was nothing I could do. She killed that girl and then turned on me.’
‘And that’s how you got the scratches on your arms and the blood on your hands,’ I said.
‘Yep. She attacked me and ran off. I was trying to find her when you found me on the beach.’
‘Shit,’ I said.
‘Yeah, it’s shit,’ said Sean.
‘But why did she do it?’ I asked. I watched Sean rest his head back onto the arm of the sofa as he laid down and closed his eyes. ‘We need to know everything if we’re going to help you find her.’
‘I don’t need help. You’ve helped me enough by getting me out of that place. But leave me to deal with this and go back to your people,’ said Sean. His eyes had opened to slits as he spoke and he struggled to keep them open.
‘Sean, don’t you get it? Me and Kay can’t go back. What do you think will happen if we go back after we helped a murderer escape?’
‘I’m not a murderer,’ Sean growled, his eyes opening wider.
‘I know, but they think you are. We can’t go back,’ I said. ‘Not without a murderer.’
‘I’m not going to let you hand Anna over to them,’ said Sean, wincing as he pushed himself up on his elbows. ‘You saw what they did to me. I’m going to find Anna and get the pair of us out of this psycho town.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘We’ve just risked everything to get you out of St Andrews because we believed you were innocent and could help us find the murderer. You can’t just fuck off and leave us in the shit. She might be your sister but she has to pay for what she did.’ I watched as Sean lay down and rolled over onto his side, his back to me, a sign that he considered the conversation to be over.
Kay took the master bedroom and I got a little kid’s room. The only other bedroom must have belonged to a teenager: posters of boy bands I’d never heard of lined the walls and make-up littered the dressing table by the window. But it stank of piss and something else really disgusting. The bed was unmade and the crumpled sheets were stained. The contents of the wardrobe lay strewn across the floor, with some of the clothes having been torn to shreds. The wardrobe door hung open and the mirror on the inside had been smashed. Shards of glass lay on the floor below. Books with bright pop art covers in candy colours lay among the torn clothing, some had had their pages ripped out, others had been bent back on their spines. There was something brown smeared on one of the walls. I gave the room a miss.
I lay on a small bed, just long enough for me, a Thomas the Tank Engine quilt over my body. I rested my knife on a blue bedside table, next to a Thomas night light. Posters of different coloured engines, all with chubby cheeks and smiling faces, lined the walls.
The room reminded me of Jake. Not because he used to like Thomas, he didn’t. I don’t remember him ever being into babyish stuff. The room reminded me of Jake because of its cosy boyishness and dedication to its theme. Jake had been a superhero fanatic since before he turned two, after he saw the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie on TV. That was it, everything had to have Spider-Man on it – his quilt cover, curtains, his lunch box, pyjamas. In fact, he wouldn’t get dressed unless Spider-Man appeared somewhere on his t-shirt, trousers, socks, pants …
Then he discovered other superheroes and the Spider-Man obsession got watered down with Batman, The Hulk, Iron Man and the Green Lantern to name but a few. But Spider-Man always remained the strong favourite. I groaned every time Jake asked – moaned, whined – to put a Spider-Man movie on. I think I could probably recite every one of those damn movies off the top of my head, Jake played them so often.
I wanted so much to curl up on the sofa with Jake and a big bowl of popcorn and watch Spider-Man right then, so much so that I couldn’t stop the tears rolling down my cheeks. For fuck’s sake, where were the superheroes when you needed them? In the zombie apocalypse, my money would be on Iron Man – he’d be the ultimate zombie slayer.
I wondered what would happen if Spider-Man got bit by a zombie … would the zombie virus counteract the radioactive spider venom that gives him his powers or would he become some weird and powerful zombie/spider hybrid that climbs walls really, really slowly and pounces on humans from above to bite them and … and would the humans he bit also get infected with the hybrid virus?
My thoughts turned from infected superheroes to Misfit. Did he know what me and Kay had done yet? It must have been the early hours of the morning, but the sun hadn’t yet risen. Had Chris and Soph already gone to our camp to look for us and woken the others? What would Misfit think … would he hate me? I guessed he would. I had left my heart, my soul, my lungs in that camp. Fresh tears ran down my cheeks. I sobbed until exhaustion yanked me into sleep.
A knock on the door woke me. It had been gentle, more of a scuff, but it had been enough to spring my brain back to the waking world. I pushed the covers off my skinny body, sat up and swung my socked feet to the floor. I rubbed my eyes. The knock again. I guessed it must be Sean; Kay wouldn’t bother knocking, not with me. ‘Just a second,’ I said, standing and stumbling over the toys scattered on the floor, making my way towards the door.
I opened it to see a zombie standing there. My eyes widened and my jaw dropped as I took in the unexpected site. Shock made my body immobile for a moment, then my hands finally caught up with my brain and I tried to push the door shut. But, too late, the zombie lunged at me – more of a morning zombie than I was. ‘Fuck off!’ I yelled at it as I pushed against the white painted wood. The door began to close, when another zombie staggered down the hall and added its rotting hands to the other side. The added weight caused the door to surge inwards, throwing me onto the floor on my back.
The two zombies lurched into the room, their dirty, decaying hands grabbing downwards for me. One wrapped its fingers around my left ankle. I rolled over onto my stomach and kicked my leg out, trying to dislodge it, but more dead hands grabbed the waistband of my jeans.
I used my arms to crawl across the floor, desperate to get to my knife on the bedside table, but the zombies pulled me back faster than I could go forwards. One put the weight of its body on my legs and pinned me to the ground. I could smell dried rotting meat as I dug my nails into the dark blue carpet, clawing at it in frustration.
Stuck, and with gooey zombie jaws about to bite down on me at any moment, I flailed my arms about the toy littered floor. I felt something soft and fluffy and batted it out of the way. I touched something else made from squishy foam. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ I yelled. Then the fingers of my left hand touched something cold … metal, long and thin. I grasped it, held it up and saw I held a toy plane, about eight inches long, its nose nice and pointy. I turned my upper body. The zombie on my legs lower its mouth to my right side. I thrust the pointed end of the plane into its ear, ramming it in as far as I could, a grunt escaping my lips.
The zombie’s body fell on top of me and I shoved it off. The other one still had my foot and it pulled up at the same time as bending down towards my ankle, exposed without my Converse on. I saw another zombie staggering into the room behind it. I kicked out with my free foot and delivered a hit to the first zombie’s chest. It staggered back into the newcomer. I sprang to my feet, lunged towards the bedside table and picked up my knife. I span round, bounced forwards and drove my blade through the first zombie’s eye. Pulling out my knife, I stabbed the next one up through its open mouth.
I shoved my feet into my baseball boots, grabbed Misfit’s jacket from where I’d left it on a chair by the window, slipped it on and darted out of the room. A zombie stood outside the door to the master bedroom, its back to me. I strutted up behind it and stabbed it in the back of the head before it had chance to turn. It fell to the floor just as the door opened and Kay appeared, looking
sleepy. ‘Morning,’ she said. ‘Just a typical day in the zombie apocalypse, eh?’
‘Kay … Sean’s downstairs,’ I said. ‘If the zombies broke in and managed to get this far …’
‘What? Shit!’
She disappeared for a second and returned with her axe and the both of us flew down the stairs. A couple of zombies staggered around the hall as if deciding which room to take, and another stumbled in through the front door which stood wide open. Me and Kay sliced and diced them, before heading into the living room. There was no sign of Sean on the sofa or anywhere else in the room … not even half munched pieces of him.
A zombie clawed at the flat screen TV. Kay took the back of its head off with her axe. ‘Sean!’ she called. Silence.
We trotted out of the room and down the hall. We couldn’t find Sean in the dining room or the kitchen. The back door was locked, but we glanced through the kitchen window to check the garden – a small concrete courtyard, surrounded by brick and concrete walls taller than me – but no sign. Inside, Kay called for him again. We checked upstairs in the stinking piss bedroom and the bathroom. Empty. ‘Where is he?’ asked Kay as we walked down the stairs.
‘I guess he decided to leave us in the shit after all,’ I said, slipping through the front door and down the steps to the street. I stood with my hands on my hips, scanning the street in both directions. ‘The bastard’s ditched us to go and look for Anna.’
The sun was only just rising. I guessed that I hadn’t slept long, so wherever Sean had gone, he probably hadn’t got far. Me and Kay jogged back the way we had come the night before, back into town, both of us snapping our heads left and right for any sign of Sean or zombies. As we turned into Rendezvous Street, I spotted a few zombies staggering down Church Street but they were far enough away for us not to worry about at the speed we travelled.
Blog of the Dead (Book 2): Life Page 10