by Ian Woodhead
He almost jumped out of his skin when one of those dead things banged against the door. Those tactics weren’t going to work with those things though, were they? Oh Jesus, just where the hell could he go? Kevin was trapped in his bedroom. He hurried over to his window and peered out. He might have a chance out there, on the street. He spun around as they banged on the door yet again. This time, he actually saw the doorframe shake.
His gut dropped when he saw a pair of mottled grey hands appear under the door. The fuckers were trying to find a way in. How long would it take for them to burst in here and launch into his poor body? He guessed maybe an hour; if he was really lucky, maybe two hours. He shook his head and pressed his back against the door, knowing that even with the blade he’d be hard pressed to stop one, never mind three of the bastards.
How long would it take them to realize that his door wasn’t as solid as it looked? His dad had once put his fist through his sister’s door during one of their drunken arguments. The fingers disappeared and the banging resumed. They were going to be through that bloody door as if it was made from paper maché. He let out a hysterical giggle; it probably was.
The door handle began to turn and Kevin screamed.
“No you flipping don’t!”
He raced over, grabbed the foot of his bed, and pushed it across the door. Bloody hell! He was such an idiot! He should have done that in the first place! Why didn’t he run into Claire’s bedroom? Her door had a massive lock and bolt on it. The handle swung down and flipped back up again. Were they learning or remembering? Why was he even asking? If he didn’t do something, he would soon be their dinner; even with the bed blocking the door, it wouldn’t hold them forever.
The light from the full moon shone through the window. He heard no sounds at all from outside. There had been a few screams earlier, but nothing for a good few minutes since. He picked his bayonet off the bed and opened the window to get a better view. Breakspear looked deserted. He looked up and saw the telltale flashing light of an aircraft slowly descending.
“Maybe it’s just happened in the estate. I bet the rest of England is still OK ...”
The handle turned and this time it stayed down. He leaned out. It was a fair way to drop, but the ground should be soft. If he stayed in the middle of the road and ran like fuck, he’d be out of this godforsaken estate and back on the main road in five minutes.
“And back to normality.”
He threw the bayonet out, looked up and down the street one last time, and climbed onto the windowsill. When he saw those things pushing open the door a couple of inches, sliding the bed away from the wall, he screamed again and nearly jumped there and then.
They still couldn’t get in, not yet anyway. Kevin turned, his eyes fixed on that door. Two pairs of hands reached around and inched up and down the edge. He was pretty sure one pair belonged to his sister.
Maybe there was a cure for this already. Maybe it still wasn’t too late to save the ones affected.
“I’ll come back, Claire,” he whispered. “I promise.” He eased his legs and body out into the warm night air. He doubted that the drop would hurt him if he hung from the window and dropped to the ground; it should only be a few feet.
As he clung to the outside window ledge, preparing to let go, his boot was grabbed. He jerked his head down and saw Thom’s head leaning out of the open living room window, the boy’s hand guiding his foot towards his snapping jaws. He felt his fingers slipping. Oh fuck. If he let go now, he would break his bastard neck when he hit the ground.
He swung his other foot into Thom’s face and felt the crunch of broken teeth, but the grip on his boot still remained firm. Kevin booted him again. This time he managed to find the spot he’d already hit with the binoculars. His foot sank into Thom’s head. It felt like he’d just booted a watermelon. The hand released his foot just as both of Kevin’s hands slipped off the wooden sill. He instinctively brought up his knees when his feet crashed into the lawn.
Kevin rolled away from the window, then shakily got back on his feet. He had done it! He couldn’t believe that he’d just jumped out of his own pissing window. Kevin reached down, snatched his bayonet out of the lawn, and looked over at the downstairs window.
He managed a strangled laugh. “Got you that time, didn’t I?”
Thom half sprawled out of the window; he wasn’t moving. Kevin tapped Thom’s head with the flat of his blade, then jumped back. He still didn’t move.
“Yeah, I got you that time,” he repeated. He used the deep grass to wipe off the thick mess coating the front of his boot. Events would have been so much different if Kevin had opted to wear his comfortable fabric trainers when he changed out of his school uniform tonight. His stomach suddenly rebelled.
“Oh, Jesus!” Kevin fell to his knees and threw up his last meal into his dad’s flowerbed.
The sound of moaning made him look up towards his bedroom window. He wiped his chin on the back of his hand, then let out a small moan of his own. His sister had managed to get into his bedroom. Claire’s hungry eyes viewed him much as a dog looked at a rabbit. She slowly blinked before turning around and disappearing from view.
He rushed over to the garden gate, unlatched it, and ran out into the still-deserted street. Kevin glanced behind him. He could see Claire through the kitchen window making her way towards the open front door. Oh fucking hell! The bitch was following him.
Yeah, well let her. It’s not like she’d be able to catch him. Kevin ran into the middle of the road and sprinted to the end of the street. He then stopped and turned around. Claire had reached the gate. She paused too, then slipped out of the garden and lurched away in the opposite direction.
Kevin turned onto Breaks Road and walked over to the white lines. He stopped in the middle and slowly turned in a tight circle. It felt like he was the last person on the estate still alive. Nothing moved. The main road leading out of the estate was at the end of this street. He consoled himself, knowing that in a few moments his nightmare would be over.
He started to jog. There was no point in knackering himself out by going hell for leather. He passed an upturned pram in the middle of the road and turned away when he saw the lumpy mess spattered all over the tarmac, not wanting to dwell upon the horror that must have happened on this spot earlier tonight. Jesus, the whole of Breakspear had descended to hell. He continued on, his mind conjuring images of a zombie infant crawling towards him, clacking its jaws like a set of comedy teeth.
“Is the situation not bad enough without you thinking up disturbing shite like that?” muttered Kevin.
In a house a few doors from where he stood, an upstairs light flicked on. His hope surged knowing that he wasn’t the only person in the estate still alive. No dead person would turn on a bloody light, unless they leaned on it. He altered course and jogged towards the house, already planning on what he would say to the occupants.
As he approached, a high-pitched scream blasted out from the house. Kevin shuddered to a halt and fell to his knees. He couldn’t take any more of this. It was just too much.
The screaming abruptly stopped, and Kevin spared a single thought for the poor bastard who had just been got. He didn’t have a clue who lived there. Unlike the rest of his family, he had kept to himself. He guessed he’d feel a lot bloody worse if he actually knew who had lived at that house.
It was bad enough when his sister turned into one of them, and they hadn’t liked each other for years. It was like having a stranger living in the house. Kevin had always preferred his own company and yet, for the first time in his life, he craved the company of another living person.
The silence was broken when he heard a frantic tapping on glass. He automatically looked over to the house before realizing that the noise came from an estate car parked on the other side of the road. Through tear-soaked eyes, he saw a round, pink blur pressed against the rear window of the car.
Kevin heard the door open as he wiped his eyes. He got ready to run, just in case
the figure turned out to be one of those things.
He watched a young girl, possibly a year older than him, approach him. He didn’t have a clue who she was. He didn’t recognize her from school.
“Oh, my God!” she gasped. “Are you really alive?”
Kevin nodded.
The girl sobbed and ran up to him. She wrapped her arms around his body, hugged him tight, then buried her face into his shoulder. Her brown hair smelled of strawberries and honey.
“Oh my God, I thought I was the only one left.”
Kevin didn’t know whether he should hug her back or not, as he’d never hugged a girl before. He decided to risk it.
“My mum’s dead.” She peeled her face off his shoulder and nodded over to the house next to them. “We only came to drop off my gran’s birthday present. Everything was normal, and then all of a sudden my dad dropped the paper he was reading and jumped on my mum.”
She put her head back on his shoulder and quietly sobbed.
“What the hell is going …” the girl stopped in mid-sentence; her body went rigid and she began to moan.
“What’s wrong?” he said, fearing the worst. Kevin tried to release her grip but she wouldn’t let go.
“There’s one behind you.”
She finally let him go, then grabbed his hand and dragged him to the car. Kevin spun his head to see a woman with no arms staggering towards them.
He was so focused on her that he failed to notice the thudding sound of approaching boots until it was too late. The bayonet was snatched from Kevin’s grasp.
“Give me that knife, you fucking useless clown.”
He watched, shocked into inaction, as a gangly youth wearing a biker’s jacket and sporting a blonde crew cut ran forwards and pushed the blade through the woman’s eye. The youth then lifted his leg high and booted her to the ground.
“How the fucking hell have you two managed to stay alive for so long?”
He walked up to the corpse and pulled the bayonet out of her head, wiped both sides of the blade on the woman’s coat, and tucked it under his belt.
“I mean, just how dangerous can this bitch be? She’s got no fucking arms and yet you still piss your pants and cringe away.”
Kevin tried to place the boy’s face as he swaggered up to them. He’d seen him around the estate but didn’t know his name. He did know that the lad hung around with Ashton Naylor, so obviously the bastard was going to be trouble.
“Is this your girlfriend, big nose? She’s cute, far too pretty for an ugly bitch like you.”
The boy pushed past him and tried to place his arm around the girl’s shoulder. She whimpered, ran behind him, and got hold of Kevin’s hand.
Her clinging to him made him feel strange, but in a good way. His mother had been the last female to hold his hand … when he was about nine.
The tall lad sneered. “Suit yourself, you weird bitch. I’m Darren, by the way. I expect to hear you scream my name when the next dead freak wants to scoff you and your queer boyfriend.”
He spun around and stormed away.
“Good riddance,” muttered the girl.
Kevin wished he knew what this girl’s name was, but he was too scared to ask her. He watched the tall boy getting further and further away and began to panic.
“Wait on!” he shouted.
The girl squeezed his hand. He felt the same way, but Darren knew Ashton and that meant that the fucker was tough. It might only be about half a mile to the edge of the estate, but Christ alone knew what could jump out on them between here and the edge. He was sure that he could swallow his pride for the next few minutes. The girl would understand his reasoning, he was sure of it. He wouldn’t be able to protect her; Darren had stolen his bayonet.
Darren stopped and turned. “Are you addressing me?”
“Do you not want to come with us?” Kevin stammered. “We’re getting out of here.”
The boy slowly grinned, humorlessly, and walked back up to Kevin. “Well then, why the fuck didn’t I think of doing that? I mean, here I am running about like some brainless dog turd, just hoping that someone like you would show me the light.” He rapped his fist on Kevin’s forehead. “The estate’s been cut off, you fucking moron.” Darren sighed. “Wait on, I bet this is the first time that you two scared little bunnies have dared to venture out of your hidey holes, isn’t it?”
Kevin nodded. It seemed the safest thing to do.
“Trust my luck to be saddled with a pair of little mice,” he muttered, then grabbed hold of Kevin’s arm and pulled him out of the girl’s grasp. “You stay there, princess.” He bent down to Kevin’s level. “If you want to stay with me, you’d better pull your fucking weight. Are we clear on that?”
Kevin nodded again.
“I was with a couple of lads earlier and they pulled their weight; we made a good team until some Army cunts in gasmasks put bullets through their brains.”
Darren gave him back the bayonet
“You’re gonna fuck up the next zombie we find. If you start blubbing or try to run away, I’ll ram your pig sticker up your fucking arse.”
Chapter Seven
The group had all stopped running a few minutes ago. Ernest actually thought that his heart was going to explode. He looked at the young ones, noting that they were in a worse state than he was. Ironic, considering he was twice their age.
“How do you feel, old man?”
Ernest studied the young lad. He looked as though he had just completed a marathon. He grinned, his mouth widening when he saw Adrian hurriedly wiping the sweat off his forehead. “I think I’m doing okay, for an old man, that is. Should I not be worried about you, Adrian? I suspect this running about thing must be alien to you.”
The boy shrugged. “I’ll be okay. It’s just a matter of getting used to it, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I guess it must be,” Ernest replied. He despaired of the modern generation. Their over-reliance on technology had turned them all into slobs. Rigorous exercise would not interest any of them unless you could download it as an app for their stupid phones.
He pushed those irrelevant thoughts to the back of his mind and took a deep breath to prepare himself. “Adrian, you’ll be okay here?”
The boy nodded back. “Yeah, look where we stopped.”
They had all stopped in what Adrian had earlier named ‘the safe zone’. That meant any place away from low walls, corners of buildings, and parked vehicles, especially the bloody vehicles. The group had spotted a dozen of the ‘deadies’, another phrase coined by Adrian, hiding under cars. Any poor sod that got near them found a pair of arms reaching out, pulling them off balance and dragging them under the car. They’d seen it happen a couple of times whilst travelling through Breakspear.
Ernest nodded once. Adrian nodded back and so did Emily. Mrs. Watson just leaned across and pecked his cheek.
“Good luck, dear,” she whispered.
They’d picked her up about twenty minutes ago. Ernest saw the woman as they were running past the shops. Her back was flat against the mini-market’s metal shutters. Three of the deadies were shambling towards her; his group had been on the other side of the street and Ernest privately thought that they wouldn’t be able to reach her in time.
There was only one of the buggers left standing when they reached the woman. Adrian took that one out with his weighted sock. It turned out that Mrs. Watson was more than capable of looking after herself, as her husband had found out when he went all funny just after ‘Eastenders’ had finished earlier on.
Ernest also discovered that she delivered Avon products in her spare time; she promised him that when this was all over, she would be more than willing to slip him the odd free bottle of shampoo as long as he kept quiet about it. She was the only person in their little group who seemed to think that everything would be back to normal in the morning.
As agreed earlier, Ernest swapped his trusty pool cue for Adrian’s weighted sock. Their journey had not been without i
ncident. After the fourth dead thing that he’d put down, Ernest had become rather proficient with his new weapon. He’d also managed not to vomit from the stomach-churning sound of the pool ball smashing into dead flesh.
“Make sure you look after it, Granddad,” whispered the lad.
You needed space to swing the cue, which was something Ernest would be desperately short of where he was about to go.
“Are you sure you don’t want backup?”
Ernest shook his head and patted the lad on the shoulders. This was something he needed to do alone. They had already worked out that it started with the headaches. Accepting that his wife was likely one of them now had been bloody hard but, due to their situation, he’d hardly had a spare moment to dwell on it.
“Remember what I said, do not follow me inside. If something does happen to me, just get the hell out of here.”
He needed to know for sure what had happened to Brenda. He feared that she, like most of the other residents, had turned into a monster. The others had already shared their ideas and views, although nobody had a clear idea about what had happened; they all shared the same theory that the headaches were the start of it. That meant his wife and Jess must have turned as well.
Ernest just hoped to God that they were wrong and she was with another group, trying to stay alive, just like he was. Brenda got headaches all the time; it might not have been the onset of this disease. It didn’t worry him that they hadn’t found her yet. The estate was massive, and he knew that other groups were trying to stay alive on Breakspear tonight.
He had heard sporadic gunfire all night. It seemed that some of the local gangs had dug out their toys. Those idiots must have thought that all their birthdays had come at once. It was an open secret that if you needed a gun in Bradford, the best place to come was to Breakspear.
Their group had already checked out Adrian’s house. He’d explained that he didn’t live too far from the Horse and Jockey. It made sense to check out his place first. The boy had stayed with the girl while Ernest had searched through every room. The permanent stench of a slaughterhouse hung in every room, and there were bits of flesh everywhere. The state of the kitchen had been a shock to his hardened stomach. It looked as though a dozen people had swallowed grenades before having a big group hug whilst standing on a worktop.