by Ryan Casey
But there was still the problem of Thomas coming back as a creature. That was a decision that was still in Riley’s hands.
He brushed Thomas’s greasy, matted brown locks back.
Then, he took a deep breath, and he lifted the large, sharp piece of wreckage from the top of his belt.
Riley closed the door to the bedroom. He placed the metal weapon back underneath his belt and wiped his bloody hands against his shirt.
He looked at Pedro, and he nodded.
Pedro nodded back at him.
Chapter Seven
Pedro lifted the hatch on the roof of the caravan.
“You sure this is going to work?” Riley asked.
Pedro shrugged and grunted. He held onto Riley’s bloody old makeshift bandage and a few other blood drenched cloths. “It works and we make it a few hundred metres down the road, or it doesn’t work and we’re eaten alive in here. Either way, we’re screwed.”
Riley nodded. He tried not to look back at Thomas’s bedroom door. He hadn’t had to put him to sleep. That was a decision he was relieved he hadn’t had to make.
But he’d had to make sure he didn’t come back as a creature. That was something he had had to do.
He’d closed his eyes while he’d done it, but still, the image of what was happening; of the sounds, the smells, the sensations…they were strong in his mind.
Pedro lifted himself up through the hatch on top of the caravan roof and held out a hand for Riley. Riley grabbed it and supported himself, clambering his way free of the confines of the caravan, back out into the fresh air of outdoors.
On top of the caravan, Riley and Pedro stayed low. Pedro handed Riley some bloody rags and shimmied towards the edge of the structure. They couldn’t see the creatures from up here because they were low down, but they could hear them, still. Staggering, grunting, scratching at the sides of the caravan.
Pedro stopped at the edge, as did Riley. Pedro looked at him. “We throw the rags into the garden and we run down the street. Okay?”
Riley nodded, but he wasn’t sure whether he was okay. He wasn’t sure whether his injured leg could take a fall from twelve feet. He pictured himself dropping to the ground below, being unable to move…while a party of creatures gathered around him and tore him to pieces.
Pedro unravelled a bloody cloth that he’d dabbed Riley’s leg with. He slipped further towards the side of the caravan and aimed his throw. Riley joined him.
“Okay,” Pedro said. “On three, we throw. We wait for them to move into the garden. Then we jump. Okay?”
Riley nodded. “Three.”
“Two, one.”
The pair of them threw all of the bloody rags down onto the paved area in front of the garden. As they did, a few creatures stumbled from the doorway of the caravan towards them, groaning, more of them following, more of them turning away.
“It’s working,” Pedro said. He pumped his fist. “Come on. Let’s—”
“Wait,” Riley said. He stared down at the creatures that gathered around the grass. They looked at the bloody rags, disinterested, confused.
Then, one by one, they turned back to the caravan. Walked away from the rags and walked back to the caravan and started pressing up against it, scratching it, once again.
“Fuck,” Pedro said. He brought his fist down towards the roof of the caravan but refrained from hitting it so as not to make a sound. “Fucking shit. We’re fucked. That was our only way. Our only fucking way.”
Riley brought his head down against the roof of the caravan. They were fucked out here. Even if they found their way to another caravan, the creatures would follow. The infection would catch up with him. He’d been lucky to make it this far, even. But of course—whatever god there was up there just wanted to give him another shitty challenge to complete. Another battle of morals. Yeah, well fuck morals. Fuck it all.
Then he noticed the hatch.
“I say we jump and make a run for it anyway,” Pedro said. “Otherwise we’ll be stuck here forever. It’s gonna be cold tonight. Just look at those fucking clouds, bruv. We’re gonna freeze out—”
“What if…what if instead of drawing them away from the caravan, we can lure them into the caravan?”
Pedro squinted at Riley. “What are you suggesting?”
Riley wasn’t sure himself. He wasn’t sure how good an idea it was, anyway. But what else did they have? What other options could they possibly explore?
“Say one of us goes back down into the caravan. Opens up the door. Draws them inside. Then…then the other of us lifts the one in the caravan back onto the roof and we make a run for it while they’re flooding the caravan.”
Pedro shook his head. His mouth opened, then closed again. He looked as if he wanted to protest, but didn’t have a better idea himself. “And I’m guessing from your…from your criteria, bruv that you’re going to be the one jumping into that caravan and expecting me to drag you out.”
“Well, you’re stronger than me. It makes sense.”
Pedro sat up on the roof of the caravan. He spat over into the mass of stinky, filthy creatures below. “And say they get you. Say they surround you. You remember the…the rules, right? You remember how it works.”
“Survival of the self comes first. Survival of others comes second.”
“In this case, let’s fuck that rule. I’d go batshit crazy stuck out here on my own.”
Riley nodded. He looked down the hatch. His idea might’ve been insane, but again, they didn’t have a better one. And it was a shame for Thomas’s caravan to end up compromised—he’d wanted somewhere peaceful for the boy to rest—but survival was survival.
“Be ready,” Riley said, as he hopped back down into the caravan.
“Already am,” Pedro said, holding his hand through the hatch, ready to lift Riley back up.
Riley faced the doorway. Silhouettes of creatures. Fingernails and broken teeth scratched against the glass. He walked right up to the blinded door. Walked up to it, stood for a few seconds, and waited.
Then, he lifted the blinds.
He was face to face with four creatures. The one at the front had clearly been a woman before she turned. Maggots were crawling through a gaping wound on her neck. She had two fingers missing, and patches of her hair dangled pieces of her torn scalp around her head like a morbid crafts display.
She pushed herself closer to the glass door when she saw him. Pushed herself closer, and those behind her pushed themselves closer too. He could hear the glass cracking under their dead weight. He could tell it was curving, bit by bit.
He grabbed the golden handle of the door and turned the lock.
“Come get me, bitch,” he said, although it sounded infinitely better in his head, to the point that he was blushing.
He took a deep breath. Swallowed the lump in his throat.
Then, he lowered the handle, and he ran back to the middle of the caravan.
The sound of their groaning filling up the small space surrounded Riley. He clambered onto the small, wooden table below him so he could reach Pedro’s hand.
“Quick!” Pedro shouted. “And don’t look the fuck back whatever you do!”
Riley climbed onto the table, which wobbled underneath his feet. He grabbed Pedro’s hand. Grabbed it and gripped as tightly as he could as he was elevated closer and closer towards his exit, closer and closer towards the sky.
And then he felt something on his leg.
First, a tug.
Then, a stinging sensation. A sharpness. Flesh, tearing. Warm fluid oozing.
His heart pounded. He looked down as Pedro pulled him further away, further from the grip on his leg, further from the creatures.
“Did you get bit?” Pedro shouted as he stood up on the roof. “Did you get fucking—”
“No,” Riley said. He looked at his leg. The area where he’d felt the sharpness, and the warmth. It was just his wound from the shra
pnel. A creature had tugged his leg while he was being lifted and irritated the wound again. He was bleeding through his bandage.
Fuck. Close. So fucking close.
“Time to go, bruv,” Pedro said, running to the front of the caravan. “Up the road to the left and back down those steps if possible. We need a place to gather our thoughts. A place to regroup.”
Riley stumbled towards the edge of the caravan roof. The creatures were still flooding inside. Their path to the road was clear, bar a few lone stragglers.
“Let’s go!”
Pedro jumped from the roof of the caravan and landed on the stones below. He smacked a lone creature round the jaw with his metal weapon and ran up the street to the left, disappearing behind the trees.
Riley took a deep breath. “Please work,” he said. “Please fucking work.”
Then, he dropped down onto the stones below.
The pain was bad, but it wasn’t inhibiting. He got straight back to his feet and jogged—limped—as well as he could down the stones in front of the caravan and onto the road. He smacked a creature to one side with his piece of metal wreckage. He could hear the creatures that were surrounding the caravan beginning to stir, growing agitated, anxious, curious.
“Deep breaths,” he muttered, with every limp up the road he took. He couldn’t see Pedro anywhere. Fuck. Where was he? Must’ve taken a right. Or taken temporary shelter in a caravan. Maybe he’d found somewhere. Found somewhere already. Maybe he’d—
His feet buckled underneath him and before he knew it he was face flat on the road.
A metallic taste ran through his mouth. His head stung. He could hear the creatures behind. He could hear them approaching, coming towards him, coming towards their next meal…
Then, he heard an engine.
Up ahead, right in front of him, it was. He looked up. It was a huge Land Rover with a trailer on the back. Inside the trailer, there were three or four people, all of them holding guns. No. Not all of them. One of them was Pedro.
The vehicle stopped. The side door opened up. Riley looked over his shoulder as he got to his feet. The wall of creatures was a good fifty metres or so away.
“Well, shit,” a voice said, from the side of the vehicle.
A muscular man with a white beard and a camouflage-style hat stared at Riley with a frown on his forehead. He had dog tags around his neck, proudly on display, like he was basing himself on a character from a film or a TV show.
“Stevie, it looks like we got another one. You coming for a ride, son?”
EPISODE EIGHT
(SECOND EPISODE OF SEASON TWO)
Prologue
Rodrigo stared at the screen of the iPad. He had the answer. He knew he had the answer. Fuck—he’d had this very question just a few days ago. Which company bought the Android brand in 2005? Like fuck was he supposed to know. He was in his fifties, for one. And for two, he was playing Trivial Pursuit on an Apple device, and Apple was his only possible answer.
Google or Windows. Google or Windows.
He looked up from the screen. Sophia stared back at him, completely poker-faced. But every few seconds, a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth.
“Don’t know what you’re looking so fucking smug about,” Rodrigo said.
“Steady on Roger,” Sophia said, nodding at the two kids playing with an iPad of their own in front of the imitation fireplace. “Easy on the language. I thought you were getting better at holding your tongue, too.”
Rodrigo tensed his jaw. Roger. Like fuck was anybody calling him Roger and expecting to get away with it. Now he had to get this question right. Show this twenty-something year old handful who was boss.
“Windows,” Rodrigo said. He tapped “Google” on the screen. “Windows…is the wrong answer.” He smiled as the game alerted him he was correct. General Knowledge genius, that’s what he was. So very clever at all things general.
Sophia puffed out her cheeks and rose from the circular table in the corner of the caravan living room area. “Okay, Granddad,” she said. “You win this time. You playing nicely, kids?”
The two kids, Charlie—who had a cut that Rodrigo liked to think of as a bowl chop—and Suzanna, both turned around and smiled at Sophia.
“Course they are,” Rodrigo said, standing from the table and walking over to look out of the front window of the caravan, out onto the tree-laden lawn. “Course they are. Good kids aren’t they? Very good kids.”
“They have to be,” Sophia said. “With what they’ve been through. Well. What we’ve all been through.”
Rodrigo pushed the images from his head. The images of his past, distant and recent. But hell, it didn’t get him nowhere moping about shit like that. All it got him doing was sulking.
Or drinking a whisky when everybody else had gone to sleep.
“I sometimes wonder what I’d do,” Sophia said, crouching on the dusty pink carpet beside the giggling kids and watching them play their iPad game. “If I…If we hadn’t found this place. I wonder what I’d do. What we’d all have done.”
Rodrigo stared out of the window a few seconds longer then nodded. “Well, you did. So that’s—”
The glass door at the side of the caravan jolted open. It happened with such force that it swung around and smacked the paintwork outside in the process.
“Stevie, what the actual fuck?”
Stevie panted as he stood in the open doorway. Sweat ran down his freckled face. His ginger hair looked on fire.
“Jesus Christ, close the goddamn door. It’s below fucking freezing out there. And by God, if you’ve dented the paintwork—”
“Someone’s here,” Stevie said. He raised his head and pointed to his left. His arm was shaking. Fuck. He really was rattled up.
“What do you mean someone’s here?” Rodrigo asked, moving closer to Stevie.
“Come on, kids,” Sophia said, scooping up the iPad and scuttling past Stevie and out of the caravan. “We’d better—”
“Yes. Get back to your caravan until I work out what the hell this idiot is raving on about—”
“A woman. There’s a woman. On the beach. She—I—I saw it and I—the boat—I—”
Rodrigo gave Stevie’s red cheek a gentle slap then straightened him so they were looking in each other’s eyes. “Slow down. Piece by piece. What boat? What woman? Tell me what’s going on.”
Stevie closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. Outside the garden, Rodrigo could hear talking. Chattering. The others were awake. The others were curious.
“Are you gonna tell me or—”
“I’d rather show you.”
The pair of them were in the Land Rover a few moments later. They turned out of the caravan site, out past the oval-shaped leisure centre, through the large steel gates that were constantly manned by two people switching on a rota three times per day.
“This better be damn well worth travelling out to the Dumping Ground to see,” Rodrigo said. He stared out at the coast as Stevie put his foot down, the wind blowing Rodrigo’s lengthy grey hair through the open window.
“Oh it is,” he said. “I…I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to just…whether to bring her in or what. Because of—because of my dad. She looked…she looked hurt and first I just thought she was a zombie. But she—”
“No. You did the right thing consulting me.” He thumped Stevie on his arm. He’d proven a decent punchbag this last three weeks since he’d joined the community at Heathwaite’s Caravan Park. Fuck. Three weeks really did seem like forever. After years and years of time flying the older he got, finally, he’d found a way to slow it right the hell down again.
Just a pity it meant the world going to shit.
Stevie indicated and turned onto another country lane. In the distance, the Arnside Knott loomed over, the front side of it sparse compared to
the tree covered top.
“I don’t get why you still do that,” Rodrigo said.
“What?”
“Indicate. Why the hell would you indicate in the middle of the zombie apocalypse?”
Stevie’s eyes twinkled. His mouth was wide open. He couldn’t find an answer. A speechless Stevie. Made a nice change.
“I was just down here doing the check,” Stevie said as they passed an abandoned farmhouse and slowed down as they officially entered the Dumping Ground. The place seemed quiet. No zombies to their left, up the road that led to the woods. None up ahead, on the way down to the beach. “I was down here and I saw the wreckage and then—and then I saw her.”
“Okay, okay,” Rodrigo said. “Enough blabbering on about her. Let’s just go check her out. But if she’s just another one of those zombies, then—”
“She isn’t,” Stevie said. He drove through the gateway that led onto the dirt track, down past the old rock steps, down towards the gate of the pebbled beach. “See for yourself.”
Rodrigo did see for himself. He saw very clearly.
Up ahead, beside the sea, the waves bashing against it, he saw a load of scrap metal. Except it wasn’t just scrap metal. He could see a table. Cutlery. On the side, a rubbed off marking of a name that had once been etched so proudly. It was a boat. Wreckage of a boat.
And in front of the boat, staggering across the pebbles, dripping blood, there was a woman.
Rodrigo thought she must just have been a zombie at first simply because of the sheer amount of blood matted in her dark hair. The way she stumbled from side to side, right in their direction, right towards the gate.
But as he looked closer, he saw she was doing something that no zombie he’d ever fucking seen had done.
She was crying. Shivering.
“What do you think?” Stevie asked. “I mean…we can’t just leave her here. Looks like some boat shit went down. But we can’t just leave her in the Dumping Ground.”