Ed took a few faltering steps toward the front of the house, cursing his inability to bring his racing mind under control.
Come on, Ed. This is crazy. Freaking out because the internet is down?
He took another step and realised he had been holding his breath. His pulse hammered in his ears and his lungs burned.
Exhale.
Ed choked out the cloud of smoke, feeling himself becoming light-headed. He took another step, and then he saw it, and realised that the squirming feeling of apprehension in his gut was nothing to do with paranoia or late night snacking. It was more like some genetically hard-coded instinct for danger that screamed at him through the gathering fog in his mind.
In the middle of the quiet road that snaked around the expensive houses, Ed saw one of his neighbours.
Or more accurately, what had been one of his neighbours. Mr Wallace was now little more than a smear on the road, his throat and abdomen ripped to shreds. It looked like he had been dragged along the tarmac like a grisly piece of chalk, as if someone had interpreted street art in the most horrific way possible.
A long streak of gore stretched back from Mr Wallace's prone body for about twenty yards, like he had been trying to crawl away from something terrifying, leaving his life stained on the ground behind him, before he finally succumbed to death.
Ed’s mind wanted to stare in open-mouthed astonishment, but his stomach had other ideas, and he bent double and vomited up a foul-tasting brew of half-digested chocolate and cola onto his mother’s neat lawn.
Panting, Ed lifted himself upright and choked down the morning air, desperately trying to quell the heaving retches that ripped painfully through his abdomen. He couldn’t take his eyes from the corpse. Ed had killed tens of thousands - millions, maybe - of virtual adversaries, and each time he saw explosions of blood erupt across his television screen, his eyes lit up in glee. The real life corpse spread across the road in front of him was nothing like the thousands that littered the save files on his hard drive. It was so still. So wet.
What the fuck happened?
Has nobody else seen this?
Where is everybody?
Ed’s mind offered up question after question, but no answer was forthcoming. It looked like Mr Wallace had been ripped apart by wild animals or butchered by Hannibal fucking Lecter.
He slipped his phone from his pocket once more. Still no signal.
His gut squirmed.
Ed was only a few yards away from the corpse, drawn toward it by gruesome fascination, when he saw the most horrific aspect of all.
Mr Wallace’s eyes were gone, almost like vultures had descended on the body and ripped them out. Ed took another step forward, and then he saw the missing eyes, clenched in the man’s dead hand like those spongy stress balls office workers sometimes used to keep themselves from punching their co-workers.
Ed’s stomach heaved again, but there was nothing left in there but acidic bile that made his throat burn.
Ed whimpered, and then his mouth dropped in mute horror as he saw a bubble of bloody saliva inflate from the dead man’s lips and burst over his ruined face.
Ed’s mind had time to process two words - not dead! - before the ghastly mess that had been Mr Wallace reached for him feebly, and Ed screamed.
As the high-pitched wail of fright pierced the still air, Ed saw movement everywhere. The small neighbourhood woke as one, crashing through windows and sprinting around corners. All blood-soaked. All snarling.
All coming for him.
Ed’s eyes flicked across the mass of furious fleshy motion as it streaked toward him, and he saw immediately what his neighbours had in common. All of them had torn out their eyes.
Ed was running then, his feet racing beyond his dope-wreathed mind. He crashed back into the house, slamming the kitchen door behind him and locking it, snatching up a pathetic butterknife before realising that the blunt blade was useless and tossing it with a shriek.
Panic had him.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Ex-
The living room window imploded with a deafening crash and Ed heard something impact heavily on the coffee table. For a brief, ridiculous moment, he thought about the bag of marijuana he had left there and felt a dim sort of outrage, but then the thing was in the kitchen, leaping at him, and Ed was falling backwards, watching it tear through the space he had just occupied as he fell. The creature - Mrs Atkinson? Oh fuck me, that’s Mrs Atkinson - slammed into the kitchen counter with a brutal thud and fell to the tiled floor, writhing and bucking. The noise of the impact seemed to echo through the house oddly, until Ed realised that it wasn’t an echo at all. It was another of them in the living room, hurtling through the broken window, scrambling across the couch toward the kitchen.
Towards me.
Ed hit the stairs, taking them three at a time, his smoke-wrecked lungs burning in complaint at the unfamiliar imposition of physical movement. He felt fingers grasping at his ankles; felt one of his comfortable house slippers torn away, and he shrieked, pouring every ounce of his energy into ascending.
He made it another three steps before the grasping fingers became clutching fingers and his trailing leg was suddenly locked behind him, bringing him down onto the stairs so heavily that all his breath exploded from his lungs and he saw a brief starburst across his vision.
Ed twisted onto his back and kicked out wildly, connecting the slippered sole of his free foot with the blood-soaked, terrifying face that loomed below him. He put more determination and focus into the kick than he’d put into anything else in years and the creature’s nose exploded, sending it crashing back down to the base of the stairs where it collided clumsily with two more of its ghastly brethren before popping back to its feet like a jack-in-the-box and making for Ed again.
Ed screamed, scrambling up the rest of the stairs on all-fours in blind terror, throwing himself into the bathroom and slamming the door behind him. He threw across the deadbolt, but he knew the measure would be temporary. The bathroom door was flimsy; the lock even more so. Both were built more for privacy and decorum than keeping a pack of insane killers at bay.
No sooner had the bolt engaged than the door shuddered in its frame under the weight of a solid impact from the other side. Ed watched in frozen horror as the door buckled inward and a small but terrifyingly significant crack appeared in the wood around the lock.
It had been maybe five minutes since Ed had stumbled blearily downstairs into another ordinary day. Five minutes since his greatest concern had been the possibility that he might need a new packet of tobacco. In that five minutes, the entire world had changed into something he couldn't begin to comprehend.
Ed threw open the window in his mother’s perfectly-kept bathroom and hurled himself from it without giving a second thought to the drop, or the enormous potential for pain it represented. Seconds later, when the bathroom door splintered and groaned and finally crashed open, the Infected creatures poured into a room that contained a solitary bloodstained slipper.
Outside, Ed was already running.
He hadn’t run for anything in years, but on the day everything changed Ed Cartwright ran like a target in the crosshairs.
After only a moment of hesitation, the Infected followed.
*
Pure, dumb luck was what saved Ed that first afternoon.
As he ran, barefoot and terrified, around the twenty houses that made up Orchard Grove, he realised he was fleeing with no destination. If he veered away from the buildings and out into the open, there was nothing but fields and the road that led ultimately to Newborough in one direction and the bridge to mainland Wales in the other.
He doubled back around the houses, back into Orchard Grove, hoping to put enough distance between himself and his pursuers to at least give himself a chance of hiding - in a neighbour’s garden shed, maybe, or up a tree. As he continued to loop back and forth along the single winding street, through gardens and over fences, he was suddenly struck by a m
emory of the old Benny Hill Show sketches, the ones where the comedian ran in circles from a crowd of half-dressed women to a jaunty theme tune, and he felt a hysterical sort of amusement building in his mind. Ed couldn’t remember whether Hill ever escaped his pursuers - although escape probably wasn’t the point of the gag - but he knew he wasn’t going to escape the grisly crowd pursuing him. They chased the noise he was making, but if he stopped to remain quiet they’d be right on top of him. It was an horrific catch-22.
He had been running forever, until every muscle burned like it had been dipped in acid, when luck intervened and a vehicle screeched past on the road to Newborough before ending its journey noisily at the base of a tree. The resulting crash drew the Infected away from him, and Ed slowed his pace a little, trying not to gasp explosively for oxygen, and slipped into an open garage, crouching down behind the large Range Rover that sat inside.
He heard a man’s voice screaming in the distance: a bloodcurdling yelp of horror that twisted into a ear-bleeding screech of pain which he guessed meant the driver had survived the crash, for a few seconds at least. Ed wondered briefly if the man had been engaged in a twisted Benny Hill sketch of his own. Probably.
Ed hunkered down behind the vehicle for several hours, terrified to move. Once he saw a couple of the Infected shambling past the garage, their mouths and chest drenched in what looked like fresh blood, but it appeared that they moved without purpose.
Nothing to hunt, he thought, and the notion terrified him. With nothing to draw the creatures away, would they simply continue to circle around the houses until they eventually stumbled across him?
When a couple of hours passed without any sign of the creatures, Ed padded to the open garage door, grateful for his bare feet despite the painful bruising the soft soles had suffered in his frantic flight. He wondered idly how humans had coped before they had learned to fashion shoes for their feet.
You have to learn to focus, Edward.
His mother’s voice came back to him, a phrase she had used so often that all the texture had worn away from it. Ed had never listened. Only when the world ended did he realise she’d been right all along. Daydreaming suddenly looked like an activity that might get him killed.
Ed cleared his mind of everything but minimising faint noise he was making, and the clammy search for movement on Orchard Grove.
He moved slowly and noiselessly, until he could see the street. It looked empty in both directions.
He made his way silently back to his mother’s house. Every fibre of his being screamed at him that he was in the open and exposed; that moving slowly while being hunted was all wrong, but he wrestled the runaway panic under control. The creatures couldn’t see. That much was obvious. But they could hear, apparently well enough to track him accurately.
Once he was inside, he shut the door to the living room and barricaded it with a chair placed under the handle. The smashed window meant the living room was like ground lost at war: reclaiming it without further bloodshed looked impossible, and the only blood around to get spilled belonged to Ed. He wanted very much to keep hold of it.
He secured the kitchen door in a similar fashion. Neither barricade would stand up to a concerted attack, and of course the windows were easily breached, but the mere act of fortifying the house made him feel a little better. At least he was doing something.
When he was certain his actions hadn’t brought any unwanted attention upon him, he retreated up the stairs to his bedroom and sat in silence. Occasionally he checked his phone, though that was an increasingly forlorn exercise.
Days passed.
After a week, when the electricity suddenly stopped working, Ed was certain beyond doubt that no help was coming. For a while he cried softly over the loss of his mother, and wished with all his heart that he had been a better son. And then he cried for himself, for the terrified hopelessness and paralysis he felt. Then he just cried because it seemed like the thing to do, until the tears ran out.
18
Ed took as much food from the kitchen up to the bedroom as possible, working his way through the bread and milk and fruit at first, before eventually resorting to eating uncooked beans and drinking water. He pissed in the bathroom sink so he wouldn’t have to flush the toilet. He defecated in a waste paper basket, and soon the house was filled with the overpowering stench of it.
On a couple of occasions he heard distant screaming. Once he heard what sounded like a far-off explosion.
With no food left, the problem of remaining hidden became an issue of surviving or not surviving. Ed had to leave; had to at least get to the next house and hope they had a healthy supply of canned food, or resign himself to starving to death.
He spent a full day debating the situation while his stomach growled at him, frozen in place by doubt and fear. It was how he imagined a terrified first-time parachutist might feel when the plane they travelled in finally reached the necessary altitude and the doors opened.
It’s time to go, Ed. It’s now or never.
Ed moved lightly, a process which was made easier by the fact he had dropped several pounds in the two weeks since the world ended. Unrelenting terror, it turned out, was a better diet plan than anything Weightwatchers could come up with.
He felt comfortable moving softly around the house: at no point over the previous days had the whisper of noise he made as he walked up and down the stairs threatened to bring the Infected to him. It was only when he reached the kitchen door and removed the chair barricading it that his heart started to pound relentlessly.
He scooped up a large knife from the rack on the kitchen counter and held it in trembling fingers. The knife was a good weapon; large and deadly, but Ed had no faith in his ability to use it. It was hard to tell whether clutching the handle made him feel more or less secure.
He opened the kitchen door.
The first thing he noticed was how fresh the air outside smelled. He had, he supposed, gotten so used to the stink of the house that he had stopped noticing it. The crisp air beyond the door tasted incredible, and he paused for a moment to drink it in.
Slow, Ed. Slow.
He forced himself to stand still for a moment, craning his neck left and right to search for any sign of movement and finding none.
Almost in slow motion, he began to creep to the spot at which he had smoked his last joint two weeks earlier, and moved silently toward the front of the house.
Mr Wallace still lay in the middle of the road, but he was definitely dead this time. Ed could see the signs of decay on the flesh, and the rigor mortis that had set in, leaving Wallace’s arm pointing toward the sky like an accusation. When he got close enough, Ed could smell him, too; sickening and rotten, like chicken that had been left in the sun for days. He stared at Wallace’s body for a few moments, composing himself.
Ed knew all about zombies, of course. He’d popped open thousands of their rotting heads on games like Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil. He’d watched all the zombie classics. The similarity to the circumstances he had found himself in that first day had not been lost on him, and he had spent a good deal of time since pondering the possibility that an actual zombie apocalypse had been unleashed on mankind.
Ed had fantasised about the zombie apocalypse before, idly conjuring up possibilities in the clouds of marijuana smoke. Like many of his peers, he had watched the rise of zombie culture with gleeful appreciation. There was just something so damn cool about the concept: something magnetic about the thought of the world being rebooted and everyone getting a chance to start again. The zombie apocalypse would make the world his playground, just like the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead. A world without people. It had always sounded just plain awesome.
He had believed that he’d be just fine if the dead rose from their graves. He knew all the tricks, he knew which weapons to use. He knew to aim for the brain.
Turned out the zombie apocalypse was less like an online shooter and more like hiding in your bedroom crying and eating c
old beans and breathing in the stink of your own shit.
But in any case, this wasn’t zombies.
Wallace was as dead as Latin, and he wasn’t coming back to life no matter how close Ed got. Ed didn’t know if that was something to be thankful for or not. If it had been zombies, he would have at least been reassured that he had some clue what was happening.
Zombies don’t exist, Ed. You’re losing it.
Glancing around furtively to make sure nothing was creeping toward him, Ed gripped the knife tightly and slipped it into Wallace’s torn throat, just to make sure. There was no response. The wet, pliant feel of the man’s dead flesh made him gag.
Wincing at the noise he was making, Ed squatted next to the body and searched the dead man’s pockets, feeling relief flood through him when he discovered Wallace's keys.
He withdrew them slowly, making certain not to drop them. When he was done, Ed lifted himself upright, and mentally ran through the layout of Orchard Grove. Wallace, he was certain, had lived at number eleven. Only three hundred yards or so along the winding road to his right.
Can’t stay here, Ed thought as his tensed muscles did their best to root him to the spot. He set off carefully, paying attention to every footfall, scanning his surroundings and the road in front of his feet with equal concentration.
Ed had no idea how long it took him to negotiate those three hundred yards; it felt like forever. Every step he took was like walking barefoot across broken glass with his eyes closed.
All of the houses on Orchard Grove had been built to individual specifications. There was no uniformity to the designs: some were sleek fabrications of glass and wood; hyper-modern attempts to fuse the buildings with the landscape. Others were low and expansive complexes that looked more like plush public buildings than private homes. Still others were modern twists on old themes, fresh interpretations of stately homes.
Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5) Page 11