Undead at Heart

by Calum Kerr

  Everything seemed normal, except there were no people.

  They reached the edge of the field and Stan went ahead to open the gate. He held it while everyone filed past then, following the ‘countryside code’ as he’d been taught as a child, made sure it was shut behind them. They found themselves in the main yard. Everything was silent. The gate had made quite a clang when Stan had shut it, but no-one had come to investigate.

  Nicola made no move to advance further, but the whole group seemed to have started to think for themselves, as individuals. One or two of the men wandered off towards the barns, shouting their hellos.

  The main group, clustered around Nicola now, rather than forcing her to be the arrowhead of their advance, wandered towards the nearest of the houses. Stan moved around the side of the group and took the role of caller-in-chief.

  His shouts bounced back to him from the sides of the courtyard as they moved through it. Beyond that and the other calls and shuffles emanating from their group, there was nothing.

  They reached the door of the house, and Stan found it slightly ajar. He knocked anyway, heavy blows which shook the door in its frame and opened it a little wider. “Hello! Anyone home?!”

  Even as he shouted, and felt slightly embarrassed for the clichéd nature of his call, he knew that there would be no response. He knew empty houses, and this was one of them.

  Still, he called again, “Hellooooo?”

  Nothing.

  He looked back towards the group, but no-one said anything, so he faced forward once more and pushed the door open. It was dark inside, and there was no sound at all. He could see it was a kitchen but there was no sound coming from the fridge or the freezer. They must still be within range of that pulse thing, he thought.

  He glanced at the others again, still receiving nothing but expectant stares. He locked eyes with Nicola and after a moment he saw her shoulders sag and then she gave him a slow, shallow nod. He nodded back and then turned and stepped into the house.

  His boots sounded loud on the bare floorboards in the kitchen. They made a hollow noise which suggested that there would be a cellar underneath. He wondered for a moment if the missing people might be hiding down there, but then realised what silly thought that was. Who would hide in an unlit cellar during a blackout?

  He knew it was a daft thought and yet, as he stepped further into the gloom, he couldn’t get the image out of his mind of a group of people crouching below him in the darkness, peering at the ceiling and the booming noise coming from his boots. Or maybe they weren’t people, but monsters, their claws reaching up towards the sound.

  It wasn’t cold, but he felt himself shiver.

  He took another step, now completely enveloped by the darkness of the house. He glanced back to make sure the door was still open. Sunlight was streaming in, but died where it fell.

  “Hello?” he called again, his voice surprisingly flat within the confines of the room. He raised it, tried to break through the muffle which now seemed to surround him. “Hello!”

  There was still no response.

  His eyes were slowly adjusting to the lack of light and he looked around the room. It was a fairly ordinary kitchen. A large table filled the centre of the room. Fitted cupboards and a large cooker lined the walls. There were two doors, one of which presumably led to the rest of the house, the other to a pantry or a utility room of some kind.

  Maybe it was the way down to the cellar.

  Despite the invitation they presented, he didn’t want to venture any further. He turned, intending to go back out and report, when he heard a noise behind him.

  He spun round and could just see the door which he thought led to the rest of the house swinging slowly open. Its hinges gave a low groan, and Stan almost laughed at the horror-movie cliché of it.

  The door swung all of the way open before it stopped, its base grinding into a groove in the floor. It was entirely dark beyond, and he couldn’t see anyone there. Stepping closer was the last thing he wanted to do, but he made himself do it nonetheless, taking one, two, three steps towards the door.

  He could make out the vague shape of someone in the doorway. As he moved further away from the doorway, his eyes were better able to make out the shape. It looked like an old lady, probably in her 70s or 80s.

  “Hello?” he said, softly, taking another couple of steps. “Are you okay? The power went out, but it’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you or anything. We were just looking for some shelter.”

  He pointed back towards the doorway where he hoped the woman could see some of the others. He glanced back to see if they were there and when he faced forward again, the woman was right in front of him.

  He looked at her and felt his stomach tighten. There was something wrong with her face. Something really, really wrong. He took one stumbling step backwards, but got no further before she was on him.

  Her fingers dug into his shoulder, like steel talons, and she leapt, her knees hitting him in the chest firmly enough for her slight weight to knock him onto his back, and then her mouth was at his neck and her teeth were tearing and ripping.

  Stan screamed once before his throat was gone, and then he simply gurgled.

  Nineteen

  Tony didn’t realise his head was hurt until he felt Samantha touch it. Then he winced away from the sharp pain in his scalp and turned to look at her, accusation on his face.

  “Ow! What are you doing?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s not me. You’ve got a cut, you’re bleeding.” She held her fingers up and he saw the ruby shine of fresh blood. He reached his hand up to his head and felt the warmth of the blood and the sting of the cut. In fact, now that she had pointed it out, he could feel the trickle of the blood running down the left hand side of his head through his hair.

  He traced it absent-mindedly with his fingers, unable to leave the painful gash alone, as he turned back and, like the others, watched the two metal contraptions stride away over the treetops.

  Part of Tony had expected the people from the pub to all be as shocked as Bert’s wife. But he guessed, like himself, they were finding this too big a thing to take in. It was almost comical watching these fantastical robots lurching through the woods, dragging trees with them when they brought their spindly legs up to take another step.

  And what would be the point of running? It would only take those things a few strides and they would be right on top of them again. He guessed what he felt was resignation. He’d just been given a vision of what was happening, and it was so big that he now knew there was nothing he could do. All the planning and running was for nothing. He might as well give up, find a pub that hadn’t been trampled to the ground, and find a bottle to crawl into while he waited for the world to end.

  Bert was crouching next to his wife, slapping her face gently, and she was starting to come round. Doreen looked up into his face and smiled. Tony wondered for a moment what it would be like to know someone so well that a look like that would come onto their face when they woke and saw you. Then she noticed that they were outside and she remembered why and started to scream.

  This acted like an alarm on the assembled group, and they all started to move at once. Alan and his wife, Charlotte, knelt down with Bert to help calm Doreen, while Dan and his young helper, and the others turned to face Tony who was standing at the rear of the group with Sam.

  “Right,” said Dan, a decision obviously having been taken in his mind. He looked around at the people not helping Doreen. “Get what you need from your cars. Daz, you and I’ll see what we’ve got in the van in the way of weapons. I just know that pickaxe is in there somewhere. And we’ll meet back here when we’re done.”

  The woman with the baby, and her husband – they’d told Tony their names, but he couldn’t remember them – headed to the front of the pub, where their car had luckily been spared from its collapse. The chef and waitress – again nameless in Tony’s mind – headed to the car parked just feet away, at the side of the conservat
ory.

  “And you,” Dan pointed at Tony and Sam. “Well, you can help these guys get Doreen on her feet. We need to be heading away from those guys,” he pointed over his shoulder to where the alien walkers had now disappeared from sight, “and this farm of Bert’s sounds like the first stop. If we can get a working car there, then all the good. If not, we’ll move on and see what we can find.” He nodded his head at the pub. “I don’t want to be here when they come back to squash the ants that ran out of the anthill.”

  He turned and headed after the young couple, to where his white van was parked in the shade of the trees. The young lad smiled at Sam then followed after him.

  Sam moved past Tony to kneel next to the others. Doreen had stopped screaming and they were talking calmly to her, and trying to get her back on her feet. Sam got her arm under the older woman’s back and helped to heave her up. She was still visibly upset, but she seemed okay.

  She seemed much better than Tony felt, in fact. He just stood and watched as all these people calmly went about their business. It was like they had planned for it.

  As he watched, the couple came back from the front, the baby secured in a pushchair, the woman carrying a large bag over her shoulder. Debbie, that was her name, Tony remembered. The man’s name, or the baby’s, still eluded him.

  The chef and the waitress appeared moments later, from behind Tony. They had removed their outer-garb and were just in ordinary clothes now. Each had a bag with them and the chef was carrying a tire iron.

  A noise caused Tony to turn and he saw Dan returning from the van. He and Daz had shed their high-vis jackets. Daz was carrying a sledgehammer and Dan was trundling a wheelbarrow towards them. He said something to the young couple as he drew level with them, but Tony couldn’t hear it. Whatever it was, it made the man laugh and the woman smile. It was strained, but it was at least a smile.

  As they got nearer, Dan called, “Here you are, Doreen, if you don’t feel like walking, we can take you in this!”

  The man pushing the baby nodded, so Tony assumed this was the same comment that had made him laugh before. Doreen and her attendants laughed at the idea. “You’re alright, love. I just had a turn, but I’m right now.” Bert patted her shoulder and kissed her cheek.

  The only one not to laugh was Tony. He couldn’t really believe what he was seeing. It was all so calm and orderly. How could they be so organised when his brain was whirling and his guts churning. The urge to run was trying to overtake him again, and it took all his strength to fight it.

  Dan and the others finally reached them. “Only joking, Doreen, I just thought it would be easier to use this than to try and carry all these.” He indicated the contents of the barrow and Tony could see an array of tools: shovels, hammers, long spanners, lengths of metal pole.

  Dan took the pickaxe, and then everyone started to gather, picking up whatever they thought they could handle best. Tony managed, somehow, to unlock his legs, and approached. By the time he got there, most of the things had been taken. He reached down and picked up a long-handled screwdriver and weighed it in his hands. He didn’t like the feel of it at all, but he wanted – no, he needed – to be part of the group.

  “Going to take them apart screw by screw, eh, Tone?” asked Bert, and Doreen cackled. Tony felt himself blush but didn’t know if he was going to burst with anger, or burst into tears.

  “I don’t understand what you think all this is for?” he burst out. “How are things like this going to help us against things like that!” He waved the screwdriver in the direction in which the walking machines had disappeared. “It’s pointless, isn’t it?!”

  Dan simply waited for Tony’s outburst to run out of steam, the others looked from one to the other like spectators at a tennis match.

  “You’re right. We can’t do anything about them. But we’re heading in the opposite direction and maybe – ” he spun the pickaxe in his hands, “ – maybe we’ll find something else that we can do something about. And I wouldn’t want to be without something in my hands should that happen. That okay with you?”

  Tony dropped his gaze and nodded. Sam, now holding a large claw hammer in one hand, stroked his shoulder and arm with the other.

  “Right, then,” said Dave. “Let’s go.”

  Twenty

  Despite her better instincts, Nicola’s first reaction to Stan’s scream was to take a step towards the door. She let go of Alyssa’s hand and took another step, then stopped. She looked back, but Dave, his face white, had already reached out to take the girl’s hand. He nodded to her.

  It occurred to her that it should be him going in after her friend, not her. But it was too late to protest, her legs were already taking her inside.

  Even as she crossed the threshold she tried to work out why she had been so willing to take on so much responsibility. Everything that was asked of her, she balked inside, and then stiffened her back and did it anyway. What was she trying to prove? And who was she trying to prove it to?

  She didn’t have time to think much more. She stepped into the dark of the house and her eyes adjusted enough for her to see Stan lying on his back on the floor with what looked like a wild animal gnawing at his throat. There was a lot of blood on the floor. There was no way he was still alive.

  She wanted to run to him, and she also wanted to run away. Instead she simply stood still, hoping that the creature wouldn’t notice her. But, of course, her entrance had made a shadow on the floor. Whether the creature only now noticed it, or whether it had noticed but had been too busy to care, Nicola didn’t know. Either way, it stopped its attack on Stan and looked up with a snarl.

  Nicola realised with a shock that what she had taken for some kind of wild beast, a large dog perhaps, was actually a person: an old woman. Her left eye was gone, a red spongy mess in its place, and her mouth was slathered with gore. The woman growled at Nicola, followed by a pre-human scream which erupted from the old woman as she leapt.

  Nicola uttered a scream in reply, but not one of fear, one of rage. All the tension she had been bottling up came out in a warrior’s cry as she swept her arm across and knocked the woman against the wall in mid-flight.

  From somewhere outside, Nicola heard her daughter calling for her, but that wasn’t important right now. The wizened creature who was climbing to her feet was her priority. Nicola backed into the kitchen. She knew she was moving away from the door, and away from the light, but she needed to let her eyes adjust, and she wanted to find something she could use against this nightmarish hag.

  The woman was back on her feet. Nicola could see that her right arm was hanging at a strange angle, but it wasn’t stopping her as she approached across the darkened room.

  Nicola retreated, her eyes fixed on the woman, until her back collided with a worktop. She reached behind her, trying to find a weapon of some sort. Her hand closed on the handle of something heavy and, as the woman leapt again, Nicola brought round whatever it was she had grabbed and smacked the woman across the head with it. It was a cast iron frying pan and once more the woman was sent sprawling.

  She was back on her feet more quickly this time, almost as though the beating Nicola was doling out was giving her more strength. Nicola strode over to the woman as she rose and struck her again with the pan, driving her to the floor. She hit her again and again, keeping the demented creature on the floor, even as her arms flailed up, trying to scratch or grab.

  Slowly, even as Nicola’s arm started to tire, the woman’s arms dropped, and she lay still. Nicola stood over her, panting, the pan still held at shoulder height ready to hit again, but the woman finally lay still.

  Nicola realised that she was making a small keening noise with each laboured exhalation. She let the pan drop to her side, but didn’t let go of it, and backed away from the body of the woman, watching her as she moved towards the door. She stopped briefly at Stan’s body, but his throat was laid open and he was obviously dead.

  With a sigh which threatened to become a sob, sh
e turned and walked out through the back door. As the sun hit her she became aware of the blood and tissue spattered on her arms. Some of it was from the woman and some of it, she thought with a shudder, was from the bits of Stan’s throat the woman had still had inside her mouth.

  She fought the urge to retch and raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

  What greeted her was not what she expected. There was no Dave, no Alyssa, no group of followers waiting to hear the news of what had happened. The courtyard was once again deserted.

  Twenty-one

  The sun was getting lower in the sky. It was high summer, so it was still hot, and the sun would be up for a while longer, but already Tony could feel the day slipping away. He tried to remember what time it had been when the truck had come flying towards him. About three, he reckoned. From the position of the sun, he thought it was maybe now about six. Could all of this have really only taken three hours? It felt like a lifetime.

  He knew he wasn’t the world’s greatest thinker; or feeler for that matter. More than one woman had accused him of being emotionally stunted. He knew they were right, but hell, he’d been happy. Or he thought he had been. In the last few hours he had felt more emotions than he could remember feeling in a long time. Most of them had been fear, but still, he felt alive in a way he couldn’t remember since… since… Well, a long time.

  In another respect it felt like nothing more than a few minutes. Everything had happened so fast. He was driving and then he started running and it seemed like he would never stop.

  It felt strange to just be walking now. Doreen had recovered well and was full of bluff and bluster, with no sign of needing to walk slower. The path they were on cut between two fields. One was full of some kind of crop, the other was grass with cows grazing, oblivious to anything else happening in the world. They would take a mouthful of grass and then lift their heads and gaze mournfully at the party walking past.