by Talia Mason
The sound of either the undead’s scream or the vans engine had drawn others of its kind to the area and whilst the stricken undead struggled to get up on badly damaged legs others of it's kind fell upon it, tearing pieces of its rotting flesh from its body and ravenously feasting on them.
Gracie was sickened and enraged by the sight, the anger at what her life had become bubbling up to the surface to be directed at the abhorrent creatures before her.
Slamming the van into reverse, Gracie again put her foot down, this time hitting the three that were feasting on the fourth that had been crushed beneath the vans wheels.
When Gracie stopped the van she saw that although the original undead was truly dead the others were still moving and despite the damage they had sustained were still squabbling over the corpse.
Again Gracie drove at them.
This time when she stopped the van to look back at them no movement came from the heap of rotting flesh and broken bones.
Gracie wondered whether the satisfaction that she felt was wrong or just natural.
Caught up in this dilemma as she drove out of the car park Gracie almost failed to see the rear of the smaller blue van as it disappeared around a corner a hundred yards or so down the street.
Stunned Gracie just sat staring at the space where she had seen the van, the only sign of another living being that she had seen for months.
Caught between her loneliness and need for human interaction and the fear of that person being a threat to her resources, security and possibly her life Gracie’s emotions were again thrown into turmoil and the drive home, when she eventually got moving, was a wary and watchful one.
During the drive through the village to the track through the fields, Gracie saw no other signs of life.
By the time that Gracie had driven through her gates and secured them behind the van she was beginning to wonder if she had created the vision of the other van in her own troubled mind, if it could have been a hallucination brought on by the need for human interaction.
Despite her uncertainty about whether the van had been real or a construct of her troubled mind, Gracie hurriedly unloaded the van into the hallway before locking up the van and then locking herself in the house.
Over the days after the sighting of the van Gracie tried to keep busy to stop her mind returning to the possibility that there was another human being in the village beyond the fields who may or may not bring her harm.
Yet her mind constantly returned to the subject as she reorganized the cellar, removed the previous owners belongings from the master bedroom to be stored in the attic and set all of the solar lamps on bedroom windowsills to charge.
In the beginning Gracie had sought out others.
A hand full of secretive and untrusting people had frequent encounters, sharing information before cautiously disappearing and hurrying back to the places that they had felt to be the safest.
Over time these meetings became less often and the news shared had become darker, with tales of travelling opportunists that would kill to lay claim to resources.
As time passed some of these people reappeared as the undead, some of the others had committed suicide out of desperation but Gracie had found another two murdered, validating her mistrust in the dwindling human race.
Gracie had no wish to risk all that she had gathered out of some misguided need for human company.
Yet as each day followed the same routine Gracie was overcome by the soul killing tedium of life.
Each day she would be woken by Cat, feed him and then let him out and not see him again until the time for his evening meal came around.
She would tend the vegetable gardens in the mornings and then after a brief meal she would tend to the household chores, leaving her little to do for the rest of the day until she would retire early out of boredom and depression.
It had not taken long for her to read all of the books in the house by the light of the solar lamps and she understood why medieval women who lived their whole lives in such a way had resorted to sewing to keep them occupied.
“I can’t hide here forever.” Gracie told cat one morning as he ate his breakfast and she sipped her coffee.
Cat just huffed in what Gracie took as agreement.
“Besides were running short of cat food” she added this time getting a meow in reply.
After refueling the van from one of the petrol cans stored in the wood shed and placing the empty can in the rear of the van to be refilled Gracie drove to the end of the drive way.
She unlocked the gates before driving across the field track ways, nervously watching the road for another moving vehicle the moment the road came into view.
The streets, as ever, were deserted with no signs of life yet Gracie could not rid herself of that niggling thought that around the next corner she would not only discover the driver of that other van but also be herself discovered.
CHAPTER NINE
It was not around the next corner that Gracie came across the only other person in the village, or perhaps in the county for all she knew, nor was it around the corner after that... but it did happen and not how she had ever imagined that it might.
As she drove along the dual carriageway towards the super market, she saw an unusually large number of the undead gathered around what appeared to be a van on its side in the middle of the dual carriageways with the only other main road to run through the centre of the village.
It didn’t appear that the undead had gotten into the vans cab and as they pushed and jostled each other for the best position they were treading in a stream of petrol that Trickled from the crumpled front of the van and ran across the road.
Slowly she drove towards the overturned van.
The sound of her engine caught the interest of some of the rotting corpses, causing them to turn in her direction.
A few of the undead were run down as she pulled her van up against the wreck, her passenger side door inches away from the roof of the van, close enough that she could open the window and reach out with her sword to tap on the glass of the closed window of the van that faced skywards.
“Are we alive in there?” Gracie called sending the surrounding undead into a frenzy of howls and grunts.
“Barely” A strained voice replied after the skyward facing window had been opened the barest fraction.
“Well you’re either going to have to climb out quickly and climb into my van or I’ll have to leave you to it.” Gracie said eying the gathered undead warily.
“Out? As in out there?” the male voice said.
“Well yeah” Gracie said sarcastically as she was running out of patience. “Right now that does seem to be your only option.”
The man let out a groan before fully opening the window and poking out his head out to look around himself, coming eye to eye with a particularly rotten faced undead just before it lunged to grab at him.
The man ducked and Gracie swung her sword out of the window, slicing through the rotting neck and taking off the undead’s head that had been stuck up beyond the far side of the overturned van by its front wheel.
As the headless undead fell to the floor many of the others that had been attempting to get at the man in the van fell upon the decapitated corpse and began to tear into and devour its rotting flesh.
One of the undead snatched off the head and made off in a shuffling, lurching run with a few of the other undead lurching after it, grabbing at its tattered rot smeared clothing in an attempt to steal away it's prize.
“Come on, now’s your chance while they are distracted.” Gracie hissed before sliding across the vans seat back to the driver’s seat.
Suddenly the fractured windscreen of the overturned van gave beneath the force of the undead that was still pounding on it, not understanding why it could see its meal yet not grab it.
The disappearance of the windscreens protection spurred the man into motion and he scrambled up out of the vans skyward turned window using the sides of the vans
seats as steps to push him up into Gracie’s van window.
He squirmed in through the van window headfirst, kicking out at an undead as it grabbed his leg and dislocating its jaw so that it hung unevenly from the creatures face.
Once in the van he awkwardly righted himself before closing the window and collapsing back against the seat as Gracie began to drive.
Despite her expectations the undead did not follow, instead they all now fell upon the undead that had been decapitated.
“That’s just nasty” The man said clearly struggling not to vomit.
The stream of petrol ran for some way down the street and Gracie stopped at its end and climbed out of the van.
“What are you doing?” The man said his voice quavering with a renewed fear.
Pulling a Zippo lighter from her pocket, Gracie lit the lighter before touching the flame to the petrol, watching the flames spring to life and run along the stream of fuel until they reached the undead creatures that had been crawling about in it as they fed.
None of the undead moved out of the path of the flames nor even looked up from the meal before them until it were too late, the writhing and screaming as flames took a hold of decaying flesh had already begun and the van had caught alight.
“How the hell did you manage to get yourself into this mess?” Gracie asked as she climbed back into the van and got a proper look at the man.
He was around twenty-eight she guessed, the same age as herself, and whilst he looked a little like he was a few days past his last shave and a few months past his last hair cut he wasn’t unattractive.
There was blood smeared down his face that set Gracie thinking that perhaps his head had taken quite a knock when he had crashed.
“I’m not entirely sure,” the man said groggily. “Everything was going fine one moment and the next I was rolling and then it all went black until I came too surrounded by flesh munchers with an almighty headache.”
“So what would you have done if I hadn’t come along?” Gracie grumbled.
“Not got a clue” The man said and then groaned as they hit a pothole in the road and the van lurched.
“What were you doing here?” Gracie demanded.
No answer was forthcoming and a quick glance in his direction confirmed Gracie’s suspicion that he had lost consciousness.
“Great, that's just fucking great” Gracie mumbled as she steered the van off the main road and onto the field track.
Throughout the drive through the village Gracie had been filled with doubt and concern about this stranger finding out where she was living.
The feeling of doubt turned to relief when she stopped the van at the gates to the house and found that he was still out cold.
After she had unlocked the gates, driven through and then relocked them Gracie jumped back into the van and was struck by the realization that getting an unconscious man down from the van seat and into the house was probably going to be beyond her strength and abilities.
When Gracie had pulled the van up to the front door of the house and then ran over to unlock and open the door ready she opened the van door and prodded the man sharply in the chest.
“Hey, hey wake up” Gracie shouted at the man.
Opening his eyes and rubbing at his chest where Gracie had prodded him he let out a groan as the sun shone in his eyes and brought his hand up to block out the light.
“Were here and I can’t carry you so you’re going to have to put some effort into getting inside.” Gracie said, prodding him again when his eyes drifted shut again.
He half climbed, half fell down from the van landing heavily on Gracie’s shoulder as she stayed his fall.
Ducking under his arm Gracie supported his weight on an already painful shoulder and as she guided him into the house and to the sofa she was already regretting her choice to bring him to her home.
He flopped down onto the sofa on which Gracie had slept on the day she arrived at the house and again his eyes were beginning to drift closed.
“Oi wake up, don’t go to sleep you’ve got a head injury and I don’t want you dying on my sofa.” Gracie said sharply. “I think that head wound might need stitching and it will definitely need cleaning.”
The man simply groaned in response.
Sighing in frustration Gracie turned away from the sofa and went down into the cellar.
It took her ten minutes of rummaging through the piles of fishing tackle to find a roll of nylon fishing line.
Gracie placed the fishing line on the kitchen table and stood staring blankly at it while she tried to work out what else she may need to stitch a wound.
“Needle?” Gracie said to Cat who sat on the kitchen counter washing his face.
Gracie went to the scullery and looked on the shelves hoping to find a sewing box of some kind.
On the top shelf, above the cleaning supplies, she found a fabric covered sewing chest that she took to the kitchen before digging around in its interior and finding a thin curved upholstery needle in a packet of different types of needles.
Grabbing a pan, she dropped the needle into it along with the plate before unravelling and cutting lengths of the fishing line and adding those and a small stainless steel pair of sewing scissors.
After filling the pan with enough water to cover the items Gracie put it on the stove top to boil before as an afterthought dropping in a pair of stainless steel tweezers and the bacon tongs that she found in a drawer.
As she waited for the pan to boil Gracie hunted for a first aid kit, she was sure that she had seen one somewhere and by the time she had found it in the cabinet under the bathroom basin she was regretting that it hadn’t been one of her priorities on resource gathering expeditions.
Opening the first aid box on the kitchen table, she found sterile dressings and bandages and set them at the ready along with a pack of sterile gauzes.
“It’ll need cleaning.” She said to Cat who was watching the proceedings with great curiosity.
After looking through the kitchen cupboard Gracie grabbed a small glass bowl which she dropped into the pan which had just begun to boil.
After the pan had boiled for five minutes, Gracie used a fork to fish out the tongs and then using a dishtowel to protect her hand from their heat she used the tongs to fish out the other items.
The plate and the bowl she set on a tray before lifting out the fishing line lengths, scissors, tweezers and needle and setting them on the plate to cool as she went to the pantry and returned with a bottle of vodka.
Pouring some of the hot water from the pan into the bowl, she set the pan aside before adding some vodka and salt to the bowl.
“I hope I’ve got this part right.” She told Cat. “I Might make it worse if not.”
As Cat did not seem to care one way or another Gracie went through to the sitting room to see if the cause of all her running around was ready to be stitched.
“Wake up, wake up.” Gracie shouted as she prodded the man
“Will you stop doing that?”The man groaned.
“No” Gracie snapped. “You need to move to the kitchen so I can deal with that wound.”
“Yeah, five minutes” The man said closing his eyes again.
“No, now.” Gracie snapped prodding him again worried that if he died on her sofa she would either have a body to dispose of or he would rise again.
Seeing that he had gone back to sleep Gracie pinched him hard on the sensitive skin of his inner upper arm through his jacket.
“Bitch.” He shouted coming fully awake in an instant.
“Kitchen, now.” Gracie snapped in return.
Gracie grabbed his arm as he rose to his feet and swayed as though he was about to fall back to the sofa and pulled him towards the kitchen where she pulled out a chair beneath the light spilling in through the unshuttered kitchen window.
He flopped onto the dining chair eyeing the collection of items on the table warily.
“Is all this really necessary?” He said leanin
g over to grab the vodka bottle.
“Yes.” Gracie snapped grabbing the bottle and moving it out of his reach. “You’re bleeding all over my house and if that wound isn’t tended it could become infected.”
Gracie scrubbed her hands in the rest of the water from the pan that had cooled just enough to be bearable and after drying them on a clean hand towel turned back to the man who was still eyeing the contents of the table mistrustfully.
“This might smart a bit” Gracie said to him as she opened the pack of gauzes and dipped one in the bowl and used it to gently clean the matted blood from around the wound.