Dead Days: The Complete Season One Collection (Books 1-6)

by Ryan Casey

  A shiver ran through Riley’s body. Ivan was going to kill him. And then he was going to use his friends to start his own messed up little civilization. He wasn’t acting like a rational man, not anymore. Even the cannibalism had a sick, twisted sort of logic to it. It was within reason. But this was insane.

  More banging came from downstairs. The wing must be filled with creatures now, like a shaken bottle of carbonated drink on the verge of bursting.

  Riley inhaled deeply. “Then we need to leave him with no choice.”

  Pedro frowned. Shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do. Even if we… Even if we did something to him, he’s drawing the creatures towards our only exit. He’d barricading this place. There’s no other way out.”

  Riley looked at the burned out candle. The flame had long gone out. “How much access to fire do you have in this place?”

  Pedro shrugged. “As much as every place. Not enough, if that’s what you’re wondering. And these walking corpses — they don’t die in fire. Not at first, anyway.”

  Riley thought back to the Chinese restaurant. The way Trevor had lured the creatures in to the flaming building and the way they just kept on walking.

  “We’re screwed,” Pedro said. The groans were deafeningly loud.

  The smoke from the burnt out candle was still strong in his nostrils. Or maybe it was just the memory of the Chinese restaurant as it burned to the ground. “And what about explosives?”

  Pedro opened his mouth as if to protest, and then he closed it. He knew what Riley was implying. It was written all over his face.

  “Ivan’s display cabinet. The C4. We’re going to cause an explosion. It’s going to be our route out and it’s going to leave Ivan with nothing.”

  Riley rushed down the corridor in the opposite direction to the staircase.

  “This idea,” Pedro said. “It’s mad. Almost as mad as Ivan’s. It might not work.”

  “But we have to try something,” Riley said. He stopped by the ladder down to the generator room that Pedro had propped up. Pedro’s means of escape. His part of the plan. Shut the freezer room door when the bulk of the creatures were inside, finish off the lone stragglers in the corridor and the canteen one by one.

  Pedro sighed. He followed Riley down the ladder into the darkness of the generator room. “There’s no guarantee that this C4 is even active. I know he claimed it was, but you know Ivan.”

  Riley stepped off the ladder. The chill of the silent, unheated generator room wrapped around him. The door was slammed shut, but there was movement behind it from the corridor. The creatures. They’d have to get past them if they wanted to get to Ivan’s room. They’d have to handle them, somehow.

  Pedro hopped from the ladder and shone the small light from his gun around the room. It was silent without the hum of the generator. But the second they opened the door, sound would radiate through it. They had to think about their next step. Carefully.

  Riley stepped over to the door. He pressed his ear against it. The creatures were definitely just outside, which meant that they would be outside of Ivan’s room too. They needed to clear them if they wanted to get to the C4. And then they needed to work out their next step from there.

  Pedro lifted his gun and pointed it at the door.

  “No,” Riley said. He pulled the spanner out of his pocket. The top end of it was rusty and partly smeared with blood. “We need to take them out quietly. Ivan’s plan to lure them into the freezer room is good for us. We want to keep them there. It’ll give us more time. And the light. We can’t risk keeping it on.”

  Pedro shrugged and lowered his gun, switching off the small torchlight above it. “I hope you’re right about this, bruv. I really do.”

  Riley reached for the handle of the generator room door. His heartbeat raced. His chest tightened and tingled. Control it. Stay calm.

  He lowered the handle and he peeked out into the corridor, breath still held. Pedro glanced over Riley’s shoulder.

  The creatures were lurching into the freezer room. There were six of them in the corridor. Loose flesh dangled from their arms as they feasted on Stocky and Gaz. The skin of the creatures was starting to smell even more putrid after two weeks dead. Flies hovered around them. In a few years, they’d be nothing but skeletons and muscle waste, gasping away as they reached out for an endless supply of food.

  But the majority of the groans came from the freezer room. Ivan’s plan was working for him. But it was working for Riley and Pedro, too. They needed to hurry, but they needed to be quiet.

  “Come on,” Riley whispered. He crept forward into the dimly lit corridor. A creature was crouched down on the floor, preoccupied with Stocky’s body. Tendon and veins sprayed out of Stocky’s neck like violent, deathly fireworks. Riley stepped past the creature. He thought about checking Stocky for spare guns or ammo, but it was too risky. Better to leave the creature to its food, if possible.

  Pedro followed Riley. He tried not to look into the freezer room as he passed, where a mountain of creatures feasted on an even bigger mountain of bodies, bathing in their defrosting blood. Ivan must’ve been in the underground passage now. Making his way out. Waiting for Pedro to slam shut the door of the freezer room and pick off the remainder of the creatures in the corridor. Then fortify the main door somehow. Stop any more leaks of creatures.

  Riley was going to create a leak. A great big foundation destroying leak.

  Riley held his breath as he approached two creatures that were standing and wandering towards him. He rushed over to the first one and smashed the spanner into its skull with as much force as possible, knocking it to the ground. Pedro smacked the other creature down with the butt of his gun and stamped on its head for good measure.

  The pair of them swung around. The two creatures that were feasting on Stocky’s body hadn’t noticed. The creatures in the corridor hadn’t groaned. The creatures in the freezer room continued to squelch and slip on the frosty flesh. Worn-down teeth snapped through icy flesh. They couldn’t close the freezer room door, not yet. It was a part of the plan.

  Pedro nodded his head and puffed out his lips as they got to Ivan’s room. The creatures were preoccupied. They’d dealt with the ones they had to deal with. Slipped by the ones they had to slip by. Now they just had to get into Ivan’s room. Get to the C4. Plant it where the main wing entrance connected with the outer wall and send it crumbling to the ground. There would be no fortifying then. No hiding. Ivan could try to defend this place as much as he wanted, but it would be in vain.

  Pedro pointed at the handle of Ivan’s door. “Quick,” he mouthed, as a creature at the end of the corridor rose its head from Barney’s body and looked around in confusion.

  Riley held his breath. Grabbed the handle. Started to turn it.

  But something wasn’t right. The door was locked.

  His stomach sank. His skin began to crawl. He tried the handle again, and again, it didn’t budge.

  “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.

  Pedro saw that Riley was struggling and threw himself over to the door handle. He, too, tried to move it out of place, but it was stuck.

  Of course he’d locked his door. Of course they’d been so fucking foolish not to consider that.

  A groan sounded at the end of the corridor by the double doors to the canteen. The dark silhouette of a creature started to stumble in their direction. More groans picked up at the other side of them. The creatures feasting on Stocky and Gaz’s bodies.

  And groans from the mass of creatures inside the freezer room.

  “Fuck,” Pedro said. He lifted his gun with his shaky hand and pointed at the creatures that were starting to stagger out of the freezer room door, frosty flesh covering their lips.

  Riley looked back to the double doors. He could see four or five creatures honing in on him in the slight glow of the moon through the window. At the other side, the mass of creatures that Ivan had drawn to the bodies were blocking the route to the generator room.
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  “We have to go,” Pedro shouted, backing up into Riley as more creatures groaned and spilled out of the freezer room. “Now!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Out through the front!”

  Riley held his breath as he charged towards the double doors. A few creatures were ahead of him, and he could just about make out their heads in the dimly lit corridor. But it wasn’t enough. They could be on the floor. They could be waiting to nip at his heels and sink their teeth into his ankles.

  Riley swung his spanner into the head of a creature. The creature flew to the floor. He felt cold blood splash onto the back of his hand. The creature was still groaning on the floor. “Your light, Pedro. Your light.”

  “But I thought you said—”

  “That was when we were being stealthy!”

  Pedro shuffled with the top of his gun and flicked on the small torchlight. He shone it ahead. Four creatures wandered through the double doors. They were still coming. So many had already made it in here and they were still coming.

  Riley crashed his spanner into the head of another creature. It fell to the floor and knocked back down the one that he’d unsuccessfully hit, which tried to pull itself back to its feet. He couldn’t take all of them with the spanner. It wasn’t enough.

  A gunshot rattled in his eardrum. Another soon followed. In front of him, he saw the creatures falling to the floor as he approached them. He looked over his shoulder and saw Pedro with the gun raised. A swarm of groaning, unsatisfiable creatures marched out of the freezer room door, their appetite unending. “Guessing gunshots are okay now too, right?”

  Riley nodded and made his way to the double doors as the creatures got closer behind them. “We need to be quick. We need to get outside. Is there any other way than the courtyard door? Anything that… that takes us around the side of the walls?”

  Pedro panted as he caught up with Riley. “We can try a window. Maybe go through the kitchen and climb out into the side yard. But let’s get out of this corridor first.”

  Riley and Pedro slowed down slightly as they pushed through the double doors. Pedro moved away from the doors as they swung backwards and forwards. The canteen was lit up by a fluorescent lamp and covered with blood. The window was cracked and the door had fallen to pieces. But it was empty. Quiet, except for the creatures behind them.

  “Or we could try our luck?” Pedro said. “Looks pretty quiet here. We don’t know how long that’s…” Pedro’s speech trailed off. He lowered his gun. “Oh shit. Oh shit.”

  Riley didn’t see it at first, but when he looked over by the canteen counter where Pedro shone his light, he knew what it was.

  Or more, who it was. Or who it once was.

  Chef’s chubby body dragged itself to its feet. His intestines spilled out of his opened up torso, which he partly feasted on. His eyes were glazed, his iris almost completely white. The blood on his face looked even more stark when contrasted with his pale skin. He stumbled over to Pedro and Riley, knocking cutlery to the floor.

  Pedro raised his gun. His hand was shaking. Time seemed to stop. Tears ran down his face, illuminated by the fluorescent lamp. He looked as if he’d never had to shoot somebody he knew before. And yet, he’d been partly responsible for the storage of the human bodies. Partly responsible for the murder of his colleagues and friends. There was no getting away from that.

  Riley stared at Chef. His footing was clumsy as he knocked a dish to the floor, smashing it into multiple pieces. The creatures from the freezer room would be in here any moment. He could hear them, getting closer and closer. They had to hurry. “Pedro, if you want, I can—”

  A bullet from Pedro’s gun fired through the air, once again sending ringing noises through Riley’s head.

  More blood trickled down Chef’s forehead, and he fell to the floor, letting out a final blood curdling gasp.

  Riley placed a hand on Pedro’s shoulder. Pedro took in a few deep breaths. His bottom lip quivered and he wiped his eyes. “It’s just… All the men I killed. All the men I… I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  Riley tensed his jaw. “We’ve all made some awful decisions in this world. But all we can do is choose to come back from them.”

  The double doors rattled open. A crowd of creatures pushed through, crushing one another up against the door frames and spilling out like ants from a nest.

  “Come on,” Riley said, starting to jog. “Let’s try to get out of here.”

  Pedro took a final glance back at the creatures, nodded his head, and followed Riley behind the counter and through the kitchen door.

  After smashing through the large kitchen window, the pair crept down the side alleyway towards the front of the barracks. They heard the creatures behind them as they kept low and moved further and further down the side of the wall and towards their exit. The light from Pedro’s gun lit up the ground ahead, revealing any lone creatures that might have broken free of the pack, waiting to pounce.

  “I don’t know what your plan is here,” Pedro whispered. His voice was still shaky. He was clearly still struggling with having to shoot down Chef. But perhaps it was more that he was struggling with all the bad things he’d had to do. All the atrocities he’d stood by and allowed Ivan to commit. Riley knew what it was like for something to eat at one’s psyche. It wasn’t easy.

  “I mean, we get to the gates and maybe it will be clear. But then what? Where do we go from there?”

  Riley crouched further down and moved through the grass at the very side of the barracks wall. The courtyard looked relatively empty apart from the occasional dark figure in the distance. He wondered whether the creatures saw in the dark, but there was no real logistical reason why their eyesight should be any better than those of humans. They were just dead humans, after all. Their sense of smell, too — they panicked about that on the television and in the movies, but was it really all that much better? From what they’d witnessed, it was nothing other than the groaning. The sound they emitted upon spotting live prey. One groaned, others followed. A perfect, relentless method of communication, and yet they didn’t even realise they were doing it.

  “Your friends. Anna, Claudia. Claudia’s girl. I hope they’re a long way away. I hope they’re—”

  Riley turned to Pedro and covered his lips with his finger. A lone creature wandered in circles a few metres from them.

  Pedro stopped mid-speech and shrugged. “Sorry,” he mouthed.

  Riley nodded and pointed at Pedro’s flashlight. Pedro sighed and switched the light off, and once again, they were engulfed in darkness.

  Riley held his breath, and then he walked.

  He stayed pressed up to the brick wall of the barracks as well as he could as he rounded the directionless creature. He tried not to step on anything that might attract its attention. He could smell it from here. In fact, the stench had gotten so much worse recently. And it would only continue to get worse as the rot set in to the bodies. Wherever they went next — wherever he went next — he’d have to bear smell in mind somehow when defending the place.

  After passing the lone creature, Pedro following, Riley saw the tall entrance to the barracks. The Great Britain flag that usually flew so proud at full mast was limp and low. There was no point to national pride anymore. They’d been stuck in this situation long enough now to realise the virus was global. Or that the rest of the world just didn’t give a damn about Britain. Likely, in all honesty.

  They turned with the wall and approached the gates, which were wide open. Their shoes squelched through watery puddles, which Riley safely assumed was blood. At the front of the gate, four corpses staggered in the direction of their peers. Riley stopped in his tracks and raised his arm to stop Pedro. They had to be quiet.

  One of the creatures continued in the direction of the infested wing. It grumbled as it walked past. It hadn’t seen them. If they just took this easy, they could get out of these gates and think about their next step.

  “We sneak around these if
possible,” Riley whispered. “We make getting out of these gates our priority.”

  “And then what?” Pedro’s attempt at a whisper wasn’t quite as effective as Riley’s.

  Riley took a few more steps towards the main gate. “We find a car. Or shelter. We’ll find another gun around here, surely. But we get away from here, one way or another.”

  Pedro didn’t respond. Riley figured he didn’t like the idea. What was there to like about it? He was basically telling Pedro that they were doing what all the foolish, stupid general population did. Run. Risk getting swarmed by creatures.

  But what other choice did they have?

  Riley edged closer to the front gate. He could almost feel the freedom now. It made him realise how long he’d been cooped up in these barracks. It was good, while it lasted. But he’d be on the road again soon. Anna, Claudia, Chloë — they’d be gone. But they’d be alive. Chef had given them their chance to get away. They’d be alive. They had to be. Somewhere.

  As Riley moved around the gate, he heard a loud click above his head.

  His eyes stung. He didn’t understand it at first. He’d been squinting for the last however-long, and out of nowhere, he could see again. See the blood drenching the tarmac.

  See the gates, wide-open.

  See the courtyard lights shining at full beam.

  “Oh fuck.”

  Riley turned around and looked at the courtyard. He could see the grass again, and his cold breath clouding up in front of him.

  Pedro backed towards the gate. “The generator. The fucking generator.”

  A light humming noise kicked in, back in the main wing of the barracks.

  Creatures turned around from their walk in the opposite direction and stared at Riley and Pedro, bathed in light.

  Pedro looked outside the gates. “We’re fucked. We’re fucked.”

  The creatures began to groan and walk back out of the main wing of the barracks, towards their prey on display in the spotlight.