by Adam Millard
She left to find out if there were any pills to ease the old man's pain and suffering.
By the time she returned, Max Martigan had died, peacefully, or at least more peacefully than at the hands of the horde.
FIVE
She moved through the night, ignoring the groans floating along on the wind. She hadn't seen any creatures yet, which only served to put her on edge even further.
She could hear them, though, which meant that they were local, probably sniffing around the town for the remnants of flesh that were still edible. As the wind carried their moans across to her, a shiver ran the course of her spine. No matter how many days she spent hiding from them, surviving them, killing them, she still feared each and every one of them for what they really were.
Crouching behind an industrial-sized bin to catch her breath, she could see the store hadn't been completely decimated, at least not yet. When the madness began the looters had stripped clean the electronics suppliers. For reasons unknown, armed gangs had been carrying televisions and games consoles down the street, as if the whole thing would blow over within a few days, and by then they would be sitting in front of a 42 inch plasma screen with the newest system hooked up to it.
Fucking morons!
But their stupidity was a good thing; supplies were still quite easy to come by, provided you didn't mind venturing out from safety to gather them. The water-supplies were dwindling, though. One thing that the looters soon realised was that the water-supply carried the infection. Bottled water was the only way, but it must have been too late by then. Half of the town had become infected. Quite how the supply had gotten tainted remained a mystery to her, but she imagined somewhere, in the sewers – or at the purification factory, she had no idea how it worked – there was a creature, bleeding out into the water, its disease being sent direct to homes across the town. It was like the viral version of spam email; nobody wanted it, but that didn't stop it from turning up in your inbox.
Just as she was about to move for the store, a creature rambled into view. It was still wearing the uniform it had no doubt been attacked in – and why wouldn't it? It wasn't as if they had the gumption to change clothing whenever it got bloody or covered in visceral matter. If that were the case, the laundrette would have one helluva queue.
This particular member of the undead had been a paramedic; his green and yellow hi-vis clothing now besmirched and torn. He was moving pretty quickly, considering the fact he was missing an entire foot. Instead of slowing it down, it dragged the stump along at staggering speed.
She had never seen one move so rapidly.
It could become a problem.
She reached across to her back and pulled out the machete which had been strapped there. Freshly-sharpened that very same day – she had been bored out of her mind and reading yet another book about sparkly fucking vampires just wasn't going to cut it – it was primed to go, and she had the ideal candidate to test it out on.
As the dead paramedic shuffled forward at what must have been the zombie equivalent of breakneck-speed, she waited, controlled her breathing, listened to the pained vocalisations of other creatures in the area.
They were distant, and probably no real threat to her, although she hadn't heard the creature she was now looking at. It paid to be very careful in the moments to follow.
With its back to her, facing the store and standing in the way of her and the vital supplies which she needed to survive, she knew she had the best opportunity she was going to get.
She sprang forth from behind the bin, covering the space between herself and the creature in remarkably good time. It must have heard her, though – or maybe sensed something was about to happen, if that were at all possible – because it started to turn.
She swung the machete, whipping it through the air more accurately than she could ever have hoped for given the fact that she was terrified. Her momentum – and the adrenaline pumping through her – kept her aim true.
There was a choking noise as she landed a few feet away from the thing, and she turned in time to watch the aftermath of what she had just done.
The creature stood, motionless, confused? It stared towards her, its eyes glowing eerily in the darkness. Black ooze seeped from between its lips, which had been torn open on once side to reveal a complete set of teeth and half a jawbone. It gurgled, staggered a few inches this way and that, and then its head slipped aside, sliding down the severed neck and landing with a meaty thump on the road next to its still-standing body.
She pushed herself up, knowing that she had finished the fucker off adequately. The body fell, just crumpled like a sack of potatoes, and without further thought she made her way towards the store, wiping blackened thorax from the blade of the machete on her leg as she went.
The store window was smashed through, and shattered glass peppered the pavement, crunching beneath her feet as she entered through the double-doors. Surprisingly, the doors remained intact, which just went to show the mentality of looters; if in doubt, clamber through the window.
She was surprised to find that supermarket Muzak was still playing, albeit quietly. Nevertheless, it made the entire scenario that little bit creepier.
The lights were off in the main shopping area, but the occasional luminescent flicker from a room at the back provided enough light for her to work by.
She travelled light; these days, it was the only way. If you find yourself bogged down with items of indulgence and all of a sudden a horde descends on you, the likelihood of surviving is greatly reduced. Thus, she had no means of carrying her intended items. A plastic bag was sufficient, although a bit of a giveaway on a particularly windy day. The creatures would hear its rustle and soon be on to you.
She preferred to use cloth – which is why she was grateful for the much-maligned bag-for-life. Found at the cash-register in all good stores, and perfect for stealth and heavy objects, it was the first thing she grabbed as she made her way through to the main shopping aisles.
She ignored the fridges, and the food contained within them. It was dead food, no good for anything. She'd learned this the hard way, after a night of utter madness and a cheese-and-onion pasty.
Tins...they were the only safe food. She grabbed three tins of beans, one spaghetti, several chilli, and an Irish stew. She didn't want to carry too much tonight; it was bad enough that she was out after dark, but sleep had evaded her yet again and boredom had forced her out into the night.
She located the water and grabbed three bottles, one with a strawberry-flavoured kick simply for something different. She would have to remember not to wash her hair with that one.
With the water and meals secured for the next few days, she had time to scan the hardware section. She was almost out of twine, and knives were always useful. She bagged them and managed to find a thicker coat in her size.
Fuck, it was getting cold.
Wearing the new coat, and carrying pretty much everything she needed to get by the next few days in reasonable comfort, she headed for the entrance, machete drawn just in case the situation outside had changed any.
Suddenly, there was a clatter from behind. She whirled on the spot, expecting to find the worst. She was relieved to be faced with nothing, at least nothing in her general area.
But the noise came from somewhere.
The room at the end of aisle seven; from where the flickering light emanated.
She sighed, but knew that she had to take a look. What if there were survivors? What if they were hiding out back after mistaking her for a creature? She had to know.
Company would not go unnoticed, good or bad.
She edged closer to the door, almost hypnotised by the intermittent flickering coming from the room ahead. The shadows cast by the shelves and the items sitting on them played tricks on her mind, and a few times she found herself clenching tighter on the machete handle, ready to fight with...well, cereal apparently.
There came another clatter, and this one turned her legs to j
elly. She had to pull herself together, and quick.
She edged towards the light, which buzzed every time it flickered. She was like a moth, drawn to the luminescent glow.
She reached the doors and took a deep, silent breath. Raising the machete to optimum height, she slowly pushed herself into the room, which was a stock-cupboard-cum-storage-depot. She didn't have to look too closely to locate the source of the noise.
A rat – no, several rats – had managed to chew their way through most of the stock. They didn't even realise they were being watched as they tucked into a torn can of potato-chips. The can rolled from side-to-side as three miniature mouths attempted to get at the chips. One rat appeared at the tubular entrance of the can, crumbs around its mouth. Obviously, the best way to get at the food was to climb in and work your way outwards. The other rats seemed jealous and confused, and scampered away in all directions, in search of other tasty morsels.
She turned, smiling to herself. How had she managed to get so worked up?
And then, she was them. That, that was how she had managed to terrify herself, and that was the reason why the rats were hanging around. They just had to wait for their food to die, die properly.
Two girls, Asian, small, were chained to the far side of the storage-room. They began to growl as she made her way towards them.
Twelve, maybe thirteen, but the decay made them look a lot older, and a helluva lot scarier.
She couldn't believe the way some peoples' minds worked. The parents – who she presumed were the proprietors of the store – must have had the bright idea to constrain their daughters, gone off in search of a cure and ended up being either eaten alive or infected.
Which left the girls chained to the shelving-rack like misbehaved dogs.
She had to do something; she couldn't just leave them there, like that. Sure, they were infected, but that didn't make it right to desert them. They would go on living – in the undead sense of the word, of course – until either more of the creatures stumbled upon them and finished them off (did they even do that?) or until the rats decided that there was nothing left food-wise and made a go for them. The only reason the rats were keeping their distance at the moment was: They knew just how hungry the little Asian girls were; perhaps hungrier, even, than they were.
As she approached, the girl on the right snapped forward. The chains rattled the pole they were attached to. Growling, licking her lips and pushing out black goo until the drool was long enough to touch the ground, the creature clearly displayed her hunger and her intentions.
It took less than a second to raise the machete; three seconds in total to decapitate both of them. In the end, she fell to her knees and began to sob silently.
What had she become? Was this how it was going to be for the rest of her pathetic life?
With two Asian girls' heads staring up at her – an audience that she could have done without – she steadied her nerves, hoisted herself to her feet, and headed back out into the night.
It was getting colder by the minute.
SIX
It started to snow at four, the kind of snow that would stick. There was a frost on the ground, which didn't help matters. The barracks, though, seemed to glow as the snow landed, highlighting each and every turret, every single angular construct. In the distance, lurkers moaned and howled. It made Shane wonder if the weather had anything to do with it, although he doubted it. It could have been pissing fire or hailing razorblades and they wouldn't have reacted any differently.
Shane couldn't sleep; he was too worked up for the days ahead – and the notion that he would find his wife and daughter, one way or the other.
Deciding to go for a run around the compound, however, might not have been his brightest idea ever. Despite the fact that he was wearing a Helikon base layer and a Fox mark III fleece, the freezing air made him realise just how cold it was.
And now it was snowing, and each flake was sticking to his fleece like white-on-rye. The khaki-green fleece was soon peppered, making him look ridiculous, like a lost snowman.
His breath fogged in the air in front of his face as he ran the training circuit. He wasn't a military-man, and he'd never had ambitions to be one, but fitness seemed to mean a lot these days. If you couldn't run, then you might as well just lie down and let the pain commence, because those things would keep on coming until they got you. Unlike humans – which they clearly no longer were – they didn't feel pain, get a stitch, run out of breath. They were relentless, and although they didn't move as quickly, all it took was one at close proximity and you were fucked.
Shane didn't want to be fucked.
Something off in the distance exploded, and for a moment Shane stopped in his tracks. It was far away, perhaps a mile or two, but every time there was a loud noise it made you think. Shane wondered if there were any powers out there still capable of dropping a nuke, levelling the cities and starting over from scratch. Surely they would have done that by now if they had survived. Although nuking cities pretty much rendered them obsolete and practically uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
But this was the governments? Shane knew that they weren't the smartest tools in the drawer. Shit, the cities were uninhabitable anyway – with those cannibalistic sonsofbitches everywhere you looked. Might as well take them out and wait for the debris to stop falling; that, he thought, was the kind of mentality that the government harboured.
Brushing the explosion off in the distance as nothing more than a burnt-out car, Shane resumed his run. He needed to be careful now, though; the snow underfoot had turned the ground to mush. One false move, one misplaced boot, and he would slip, bust his neck and be out of the fucking world in the most anticlimactic way imaginable.
He decided to call it a night. No point in putting himself at risk, not when he would be spending the whole of the next week doing exactly that.
He turned and headed back to main compound.
Packing for the mission would take an hour; after that, they were out of there.
On the road to oblivion.
*
'He was old,' Terry said, placing himself down on the makeshift bed. 'At least he's in a better place, now.'
Jared moved across the room like a boy on his first day of school. 'Yeah, but he looked so fit when we first got in here,' he said. 'Looked like he could take on any one of us in a fight.'
Shane wasn't paying too much attention to the conversation, but he knew that they were talking about Max Martigan. Was it wrong that he had very little interest in that right now? There were things more important than an old man dying, at least he thought so. His family, for one, who could still be alive.
Are alive, he reminded himself. Still, are alive...
He stuffed more clothing into his Bergen, knowing that he had to draw the line, soon, or risk being weighed down.
'Well, if you ask me,' Marla joined in, 'he's gone out of this life at the best possible moment, in the best fucking way.'
Terry gave her a reproachful stare, before adding, 'Sure, the alternative might have been much worse, but there are better ways to die than holed up in a military compound, lying on a cold floor like some dog waiting to be put down. His expiration could have been a fuck of a lot more comfy.'
'Can you pass me the water-bottles?' Shane asked, pointing to the green containers on the floor next to the bed. Terry handed them to him. 'Thanks, now can we stop talking about Old Man Martigan; he's gone, out of here, for good, so let's just concentrate on what we need to do, remember, the living?'
The three stared at him silently. It was a Shane that they weren't used to, and one that none of them really cared for.
'Marla,' Shane said, sensing that there was an uncomfortable silence that needed breaking. 'Did you manage to get the keys I asked for.'
She reached into her pocket and retrieved a set of keys. 'Easier than I expected,' she said, smiling. Obviously, her sexuality had paid off once again. 'The prick didn't even realise what I was up to. I'm sure
he thought I was gonna kiss him.'
Victor Lord was many things, and that included a lecherous, old slime-bag. The Snatch was his. Well, technically it belonged to the barracks, but since he was pretty much running the show – or liked to think he was – he held the keys at all times.
But not anymore.
'Good,' Shane said. 'He's gonna know it was you, though. You do realise that?'
She sighed, then a huge smile lit up her face. 'I'm counting on it,' she said. 'Otherwise what was the point in getting so close to his cigar-stinking face?'
'Right,' Shane said, authoritatively. 'I'm taking it that you're all set, because there's no coming back once we hit that road, at least not for a while.'
Terry pushed himself up from the mattress, which creaked beneath him as if exhaling with relief. 'Got my bag packed, but turns out I like to travel light.' He lifted the tiniest satchel imaginable from the floor and dropped it onto the mattress. 'Got everything I need right here.'
Shane shook his head. 'Weapons,' he said. 'We need to figure out what we're taking weapon-wise.'
Jared nervously stepped forward. It seemed like he was waiting for this moment, and now that it had arrived he was going to make the most of it.
'I already thought about that,' he said, a slight stutter creeping into the sentence. 'I wanted to, you know, make myself useful for a change, and the best way to do that, I figured, was to get a hold of some useful shit.'
Jared left the room and reappeared a minute later with what looked like a hockey-stick case. In fact, it was a hockey-stick case; the word Kookaburra was printed down one side in fancy lettering.
'Holy shit,' Marla said. 'What we gonna do? Give the lurkers a few games on the way out, because I don't think they're big fans?'
Jared stopped unzipping the bag long enough to cast her a cautionary glance. 'Wow, you're really funny,' he said, sarcastically. He pulled the zip across all the way and pulled out possibly the farthest thing from a hockey-stick that you could get.