Undead at Heart

by Calum Kerr

  She didn’t know what the hell she was going to do next, but she knew that following the dead into the depths of a strange and increasingly dark house was not one of them.

  She went back out into the light, listening carefully for any movement. She had seen how fast the old woman could move, but at least she was small and light. If whatever had happened to her had happened to Stan, she did not want to be present if he decided to take to the same kind of activities.

  She stood in the farmyard for a moment, and then came to a decision. Her daughter was not here. Neither were any of the other people she had been travelling with. If they weren’t here they were somewhere else. In that case, she decided, she also needed to be somewhere else. It was the only way she would find them.

  She walked from the farmyard back to the road where she had come back to herself after her panicked fugue. She looked left and right up the road and with nothing to choose between them, turned to the right and started walking.

  Twenty-five

  “Dad had only just started the tractor when the power went out. At first he thought it was just the tractor playing up. It’s getting old and we can’t afford a new one, and it does cut out from time to time. He had the bonnet open and was jiggling the wires when I came out to tell him that the power had gone off in the house.”

  They were sitting on a grassy bank on the edge of the field beyond the farmhouse. It was raised enough that it would be last place around to lose the sun, and James had told them he thought they would be okay in the sun. Dan had also approved because it was high enough to see anything coming to them from any direction. They had sat themselves in a circle around the boy to hear his story, but Dave told them to keep an eye out for anything. He didn’t say what and he, Daz and Alan still hadn’t told the others what had happened in the house. All Tony knew was that these previously fearless men were badly shaken and didn’t want anything creeping up on them. Although James was facing him, and Dan was on the far side of the circle, as they listened Tony kept looking behind him, just in case.

  “When I told him he came in and checked the fuses and tried all kinds of things, but nothing did any good. Then I told him that my phone and my iPod had both gone off at the same time and he looked worried. I didn’t know what was going on, but he said he was going outside to have a look around.”

  James shook his head and looked to be on the verge of tears. But he looked so tired; Tony wondered if he had already cried himself empty. “I wonder if he’d have been all right – if we’d all have been all right – if he’d just stayed indoors with me and mum.” He shrugged and gave a humourless laugh. “Or maybe I’d have been trying to rip your throat out too.”

  At this, Tony felt Sam gave a start next to him. Rip your throat out? What was the boy talking about? Tony wanted to confront him, make him start talking sense, but Sam must have realised he was approaching an outburst. Her squeeze of his hand stilled him and he carried on listening.

  “He was gone about ten minutes and when he came back in, my first thought was that the tractor had blown-up. He was red, like he had been badly burned. His skin was blistered and even seemed to be smoking. He didn’t smell of diesel, though, but like cooking meat. He smelled like the middle of a really good barbecuing session.” Now he did give out a low sob, but he carried on talking. “It actually made me hungry, but then the thought of food made me sick. I just stood there, looking at him, feeling all these crazy things. I couldn’t move. But my mum could. She didn’t notice, and neither did I, the crazy look in his eyes, nor the fact that his throat had been ripped wide open and his shirt was covered in b-b-blood.”

  Debbie, who had left her baby with her husband to sit next to the boy, put her arm round his shoulder and held him to her while he sobbed. It was soft and muted: tired, and it soon ran itself out.

  He wiped his eyes with his thumbs. “Sorry,” he mumbled to her.

  “Don’t be daft,” she said, and pulled a tissue from the pocket of her jeans, which she passed to him. He wiped his eyes again, and blew his nose. He went to offer it back, but then realised that she probably didn’t want it now. He held it in his hands and looked down at it as he continued, talking to the tissue.

  “My mum ran over to him, asking him if he was okay, asking what had happened. He didn’t say anything, but when she got to him he kinda snarled and then he b-bit… He bit her. Here.” He touched his throat and then pulled his hand away as though burned. “And he kept biting. And biting.”

  His breathing hitched, and Debbie gave him another one-armed hug, but he pulled back and nodded to show he was okay. “He dropped her on the floor and there was blood all over the place, and then he turned to me. I was frozen in place. I should have run, or hid, or something, but I couldn’t think; couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. He took a couple of steps towards me and then I realised that I could barely see him. His skin was really smoking and by now it was almost black. With his next step he…. well, he crumpled, melted. A second later there was nothing left but some kind of dirty slime.”

  He looked up, his expression asking everyone to believe his tale, even though it was plainly insane. Tony wanted to disbelieve, to call him a liar, but he couldn’t. He’d seen enough strange things today that he thought he would believe anything now.

  “What happened then?” asked Sam, softly.

  “I still couldn’t move. I just looked at the mess on the floor which used to be my dad, and the body which had been my mum. I couldn’t even scream or cry or anything. I just stood there.”

  He drew in a deep rattling breath. “And then she moved.”

  Twenty-six

  The shadows of trees and hedges lay full length across the road as Nicola walked. There were the sounds of birds and the occasional rustle in a hedgerow which she thought could have been a squirrel or a hedgehog or a field mouse. Part of her brain kept trying to throw the word racoon into the mix, but she beat it back. Hell, for all she knew the noise was made by rats. They had rats in the country, didn’t they? She wasn’t sure.

  She realised she wasn’t sure about anything. She’d been back in the country for a couple of years, but her brain still thought in American. All her references, all her knowledge of laws, and customs, and even wildlife were for a country thousands of miles away. She was adrift in a country which, when she lived in the US, she had always claimed as her own. Now she realised she didn’t know it at all. Hell, what does a 14 year old know anyway? They know their friends, their back-gardens, the boys at school and that’s about it. Before she’d left she’d never really had to interact with the world, she’d always had her mum for that.

  She would have said her mum and dad, but her dad had always been busy at the college, even at weekends, so it had just been her and her mum. She’d seen much more of him when they got to Boston. His position at Harvard had more prestige and, strangely enough, that came with a lighter workload. But by then it had been American society he had been introducing her to.

  She missed the familiarity of New England, but was still sure she had made the right decision to come back to the old one. She couldn’t have stayed. The whole place was too tied up with her and Rob. She’d met him at 18 and he’d taken over from her father as her interface with the world. Everything she had seen and done as an adult had been done with Rob, and when she had found out about him and Crystal, she had known immediately that not only did she have to leave him and finally have a life of her own, uncontrolled by him, but she had to leave her adopted home. She needed a fresh start in a new place with new people, where she could recreate herself on her own terms.

  What kind of a name was Crystal anyway?

  She realised that she was going over all this old ground in her head to stop her from thinking about what was happening around her; to stop her thinking about Alyssa, and Stan, and everything, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to think about it all, if she did it would stop her moving forward. And if she didn’t move forward, she would never find any way to resolve a
ny of this.

  That was the way she had rationalised her move back to England. She needed to get away, and after all those years of Rob showing her off as his woman from the ‘mother country’, she knew where she ought to belong. Once her mind had been set, she had just put her head down and made it happen. She’d found her job, found her house, and a school for Alyssa, and she had moved them with nothing much more than the force of her stubbornness.

  And now she was left wondering if it was the right idea. She was a fish out of water. Every turn she took she found that although this country seemed to speak the same language, it was a twisted, through-the-looking-glass version where everything meant something else. She kept getting things wrong and the moment she opened her mouth her voice gave her away as an intruder; an interloper. She had thought she would be coming home, but instead she felt like she was living abroad. She was an ex-pat in her own country.

  She realised she was no longer simply walking, but was striding down the road. Despite the long summer evening, the high hedges and trees which bounded the road were making it darker and darker and she was all but rushing into it.

  She started to slow, but she was still going too fast to stop when a figure came crashing out of one of the hedges, leaves and twigs flying in front of it to rain against her face.

  She just had time to make out that it was a man before she collided with him in mid-recoil and the two of them fell onto the road, entwined. Nicola kicked and screamed, trying to separate herself from her attacker, pushing back on his face to keep his teeth from her neck.

  In turn the man was pushing at Nicola, trying to keep her away from him. His hand forced under her chin and pushed her head back.

  “Get off me, you fucking thing!” he shouted, and she realised she knew the voice. It was Dave.

  She stopped fighting. “Dave?”

  He stopped, mid push, and peered at her in the gloom.

  “Nicola?”

  She nodded, easily pulling back from him now they had both stopped struggling. “Thank God,” she panted, still recovering from the surge of adrenaline which his appearance had caused,” I’ve been searching for you. What happened? Where did you-.”

  She stopped because Dave had ignored her question. Now freed from the tangle he had leapt to his feet, grabbed her arm, and pulled her up with him.

  “No time,” he panted. “Later. Later. Now… Run!” And he set off down the road, dragging her nearly off her feet.

  She stumbled for a few paces until she got her feet under her, and then she was able to run with him. He let go of his hand and they raced down the road. They were running so quickly it was difficult to speak, but Nicola managed to pant, “What? What?”

  Dave didn’t respond, just kept his head down and carried on running. But Nicola got her response when she heard the sound of the hedges tearing behind her and at her side. Other people were breaking through, but all of them, men, women – some of whom Nicola recognised from the group she had led through the woods – even children, had loose flesh hanging from their throats and a range of other injuries. One or two of the figures looked strangely misshapen, almost not human at all, but she didn’t stop to examine them. She just ran and ran, Dave at her side, desperately trying to outrun their pursuers.

  Twenty-seven

  “When she did, I ran,” James continued.

  Sam watched the contortions his face was going through as he struggled on with his story. She wanted to go and put her arms around him, but Debbie had taken that role and she didn’t want to crowd him. Everyone else was silent as he spoke.

  She couldn’t speak for the rest of them, but part of her was having trouble believing his story. The rest of her, the part that had seen planes bomb a farmer’s field, which had seen two people flattened by half a jet fighter, that had seen giant metal spiders destroy a pub that she was sitting in, knew he was telling the truth.

  “I didn’t know what she was going to be like when she got up, but I didn’t think it would be good. I’d seen what dad had done to her. I’d seen the blood run out like water from a tap. I’d seen the mess he’d made of her throat, and I’d seen her drop to the floor like a bag of spuds. She wasn’t breathing after that, I was sure of it, but that didn’t seem to stop her.”

  He paused for breath, panting, reliving the experience. Debbie rooted in her giant bag and came out with a bottle of water which she passed to him. He drank and calmed a little, then continued.

  “She was fast. Between the first flicker of movement and me being out the door can’t have been more than a few seconds, but she was on her feet and after me all the same.

  “I ran from the house, presuming she was after me. I ran all the way across the yard, vaulted the gate, and kept going. But then I realised that the gate had made a loud clang when I had cleared it. The bolt gave way last year and now we just use a hank of rope to keep it shut. It means it’s loose, but it does the job. If she was after me, surely I would have heard it. I risked looking back and she wasn’t there. No-one was. I was alone.

  Finally, someone spoke. Sam was vaguely surprised that it was Tony. “Where was she?”

  “Still in the house. I went back, you see. It took me a while and I went really slowly, but I needed to know. When I got back there I could hear her in there, moving around in the dark. I called out, and she didn’t say anything, but when I stepped closer to the doorway, she leapt out, but only as far as the shade would allow. When she hit the sunlight she jumped back. That’s why I thought we would be safe out here. Whatever they are – whatever she’s become – they don’t like sunlight, I don’t think.”

  His story told, he stopped talking and his head dropped down between his shoulders like a robot with flat batteries.

  The others looked around, eyes meeting, expressions grim. One or two glanced up to the sinking sun, and Sam knew what they were thinking, because she was thinking the same. If sunlight was protecting them, then they needed to get somewhere safe before it went dark.

  “Okay, I get all that.” It was Tony again. “What I don’t understand is why, if they like the dark so much, you were hiding in the cellar under the barn. Surely that’s the darkest place around.”

  James nodded, his head rising slowly with each nod, as though he was re-inflating himself with a pump. “I heard someone coming. After I’d worked out that I was safe in the sun, I didn’t really know what to do. I was just wandering around the farm, trying to think of a plan, when I heard noises coming from the road. It sounded like engines, but not cars. I don’t really know what they were, but I didn’t want to wait and find out. The cellar is pretty well hidden. If you don’t know it’s there, it’s hard to find. There aren’t any other entrances, no windows to break in or doors to force, and it had a large bolt on the inside. Dad said it was used by smugglers or something, but I think he was making that up. He always says that –.” He faltered as he remembered again that his father was dead.

  “Anyway, it seemed the best place to hide, so I hid.”

  Twenty-eight

  Their pursuers were fast, but Nicola and Dave were faster. Her legs soon felt like lead and her lungs were burning, but there was no way she was slowing down. After a hundred yards or so, new zombies had stopped bursting from the hedge, so they no longer had to run the gauntlet of their emergence, merely out-distance them.

  They ran side by side, Nicola occasionally taking the lead, but Dave managing to keep up despite carrying more weight than she was.

  Slowly, foot by foot, they started to outrun the creatures following them. She scanned left and right, checking for any new ones emerging from the deeper shadows at the sides of the now darkened road, but none came.

  The road twisted and snaked, and signs of pursuit disappeared, but neither of them slowed down. Nicola wanted to ask so many questions. She wanted to know what had happened to Dave and the group. She wanted to know how so many of them had become – well, whatever they had become – so quickly. Most importantly, she wanted to know what had hap
pened to Alyssa.

  Even as they had started their panicked race, she had scanned all the scarred and mangled faces she could see; terrified that one of them would be a twisted, staring parody of her daughter’s. None of them had been, but until she knew from Dave what had happened to them, she didn’t want to hope that this was a good sign.

  They rounded another bend, still racing, and a patch of late summer sun lay across the road. It was the gateway of another farm. The trees and hedges stopped, and the large open farmyard allowed the last rays of the setting sun to reach them. The cracked tarmac glowed red as though a furnace door had been opened, but Dave didn’t pause. He reached out and dragged Nicola through the shining portal of the gate, facing straight into the red searchlight sun.

  He slowed. “Sun… Sun…” he panted, his breath catching in his throat. “Sun hurts them. We’re… safe… here.”

  “Yes, but… only for… a moment.Just…a … rest.”

  “Yes. Yes. A moment.” Dave stood in the full glow of the sun, his skin bloodily lit, and tried to gain control of his breathing. Nicola found the pain in her lungs was already starting to clear, and she raised her head to look around her.

  A group of dark silhouettes was advancing on them out of the sun. With all that had happened today, she could be forgiven for flashing back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but when she wiped her hand across her eyes, they refused to disappear. She reached for Dave’s arm, getting ready to repeat his favour and dragging him into another run. Obviously Dave’s fact about the sun was wrong. But before she could move, one of them spoke.

  “Nicky? Is that you? My God, what happened?”