by Rick Wood
Imagine, he thought. If people knew what I am thinking about that dead bitch right now…
He knew how it sounded. He didn’t care. If someone was to object to his provocations about that vile woman, he would simply answer, “You didn’t know her.”
She had teeth lightly tinged yellow, hair that curled into large002C messy strands of fake blond, and pearl necklaces that sat above cleavage that was only so big because it corresponded with her belt size.
And now here he was.
Free of her. Ruling the country. About to make the biggest decision that had ever been made in the history of the country.
This was beyond anything any prime minister had ever done.
This plan. It was genius.
Nothing short of pure, unadulterated, incontrovertible, inescapable genius.
Gus Harvey was on his way to save the girl. Donny Jevon at his side, probably pissing him off the whole time in the way that infuriating kid had always pissed Eugene off.
Genius.
Everything was coming to fruition.
The plan was on track.
12
An unprecedented trek through the woods had left Gus anxious. He knew they had limited time and that a girl’s life hung in the balance. Whether this girl was the daughter of an important man or not, it didn’t matter – her life could still be saved.
Unlike so many others.
Unlike…
Stop it.
Stay focussed.
Keep alert.
Donny kept tripping up, struggling to battle through the apparent pain of his arm. Gus attempted to put an arm around Donny to support him, but was already struggling with a heavy sniper rifle over his back. Finding the rifle increasingly difficult to carry due to its being constantly knocked by Donny’s incessant wriggling, Gus knew that he was going to have to either lose Donny, or lose the rifle.
After momentarily entertaining the notion of /dumping Donny in a hedge and persevering without him, his conscience concluded that he was going to have to lose the weapon instead.
Stupid little rat boy. I like that gun…
With a hesitant tut, Gus discarded his sniper rifle beside a tree and covered it with leaves, then supported Donny’s hysterically writhing body. Deciding that the Colt .45 attached to his belt would have to be enough, he marked the tree, in hope that he would be able to retrieve the sniper rifle upon their return. He looked around him for any other significant landmarks he could use to track back to the rifle. He noticed a burnt-out jeep and made a mental note of it.
He wished he had a watch on. He looked to the sky, where the sun had disappeared and the moon had begun to take its place. This told him it was early evening, and the cloak of night would soon be thrown over them.
This was an interruption he had not planned for.
With an irritable huff, he decided he may just have to accept this delay and deal with it the best he could. Adjust the schedule. Change his planned timings.
After all, they still had at least a day and a half.
Well, that was until the explosion. They actually had to get into the zombie-infested city first, locate her (God knows how he was going to do that), then extract her, and get far enough away from the city in time to ensure that they did not get caught in the impact that such a large bombing would inevitably bring with it.
The girl – Sadie, as she had grunted in her minimal introduction – led them to an opening that revealed a house.
Though ‘house’ was a loose term.
It was more like an abandoned, claustrophobically small cottage, set in the middle of the woods. It was the kind of place you would nip in to shelter from rain, not set up an abode. The poor excuse for roofing had various holes that allowed leaks to filter through, had a large infestation of mould and asbestos, and was being eroded by the rain at an accelerated pace.
Gus kept Donny’s good arm around him, dragging him forward as he followed Sadie inside. Donny’s moaning was a continual, non-stop murmur. Gus understood how horrible it would be to break an arm, if that was what had actually happened – hell, he’d broken seven – but the idiot needed to man up. Back in Afghanistan, his comrades would continue a gun battle with the Taliban with various broken ailments and blood dripping over their eyes. They wouldn’t have the luxury of stopping and moaning over spilt milk.
Gus entered the small cottage, and the inside wasn’t much better. The smell of damp hit him first, followed by the stench of dried urine. But it had a loose roof, and the resemblance of a door – two things that would keep out both the weather and the infected. And that was all they needed.
“Is this it?” he demanded of Sadie.
Sadie looked blankly back at him.
“Is this where you live?” Gus repeated, with more impatience.
Sadie nodded her head vigorously.
“… Home …” she grunted, her greasy, thick hair spilling over the front of her face.
“Okay.” Gus didn’t have time to figure out what was up with this girl. She seemed more like a feral creature than a young woman, but right now he needed to see to Donny’s arm. “Do you have a first aid kit?”
Sadie looked puzzled.
“Supplies? You know, bandages? Antiseptic? Shit like that?”
Sadie looked around herself, scowling, then turned her puzzled look back to Gus.
“Fuck’s sake. Do you have cloth?” He elongated each syllable with as much clarity as he could. “Something I can wrap him in?”
Sadie nodded. “Er… Top? … More top?”
Gus took a moment to understand what she was saying.
“Yes, a top. Clothes. That will do.”
She turned and scuttled away on all fours.
Gus turned his attention to Donny and ran his hands over the twisted bones. He was pretty sure he could put the bone back into place, but it was going to hurt.
“Right, Donny, you need to grow a set of balls for this.”
Donny interrupted his incessant moaning to turn a look of terror toward Gus.
“I’m going to put it back into place.”
Donny pulled his arm out of Gus’s reach. “No, no, no…”
“It’s the only way. What, you think we can call an ambulance? For Christ’s sake, man.”
Donny closed his eyes, winced, and hesitantly presented his arm.
Gus grabbed Donny’s top and stuffed it into Donny’s mouth, giving him something to bite onto.
“One,” Gus began.
Donny closed his eyes.
“Two.”
Donny prepared himself.
Gus shoved the arm back into place, causing Donny to scream out. Gus immediately shoved a hand over Donny’s mouth, looking through the stained window to see if the screaming had attracted any undead.
“Shut up!” Gus urged him.
“I thought you were going to do it on three!” Donny whimpered.
“Yeah,” Gus acknowledged. Being honest, he only did it on two because he thought it would be hilarious.
He was right.
Sadie appeared over his shoulder, presenting a handful of vests toward him, an expression like a dog that had just brought her master their slippers.
“Cheers.”
Gus took a vest and ripped it until it was one clean sheet of cloth. He expertly fashioned a bandage out of it and tied it around Donny’s arm and over his shoulder.
“It hurts,” Donny whined.
“That’s ’cause you dislocated it, you moron,” Gus told him. “It’s going to hurt, but it’ll be fine. You’re in battle now, you’re going to have to deal.”
Gus turned to Sadie, finally getting a chance to look her up and down. Her clothes were stained with old mud, her face grubby, her body uncomfortably thin. Even her elbows were pointed, like her bones were sticking out.
How long could she have been on her own to end up like this?
“So what’s your deal?” Gus inquired.
Sadie looked back, confused.
“
Jesus Christ, do you understand anything? Who are you?”
“… Sadie.”
“Yes, I get that your name is Sadie. But who are you?”
She remained silent, her face expressionless.
“How did you get here?”
Nothing.
Gus looked around the cottage, searching for family photos or something that would indicate a life. A family. Friends. Anything. There was nothing.
Then Gus saw something. A glint. Reflection of the moon in a reflective surface. He picked up a small scrap from the windowsill and looked at it.
It was a picture of three girls with their arms around each other, smiles adorning their pretty faces. The middle one looked like Sadie, except… healthier. With straight teeth, combed hair, a pretty dress gliding over perfect curves. She looked like a normal young woman, having a good time with friends, possibly sisters.
Sadie snatched the picture from his hand and protected it with her body, turning it away from him and stroking it. She stuffed it in her back pocket and stared at Gus, her expression wild and untamed.
“Where did you come from?”
She scratched her armpit, then sniffed it.
“Jesus…”
Sadie noticed Donny running a hand gently over his arm. In a sudden burst of energy, she dove forward to see what he was looking at and grabbed his wounded bone in both her hands, digging her dirty, long, sharp nails in.
Donny wailed in pain.
Sadie jumped back, surprised, and readied herself for a fight. Gus put a hand out to calm her.
Donny continued to scream. When Gus realised he wasn’t going to stop, he quickly swung his large hand forward and covered his mouth.
He heard a groan.
Keeping his hand fixed firmly over Donny’s mouth, he peered out of the window.
A flicker of movement passed.
Donny began moaning against Gus’s hand.
“Shut the fuck up!” Gus demanded in a hushed voice. “Shut the fuck up, you’re going to attract the infected!”
Donny fell silent.
Gus ripped his hand away and ran to the window, looking out.
One approached.
Then another.
Then another.
Within a minute, a mass of them had descended upon the exterior of the house.
Gus rushed to the window on the other side.
More were there.
So many of them. Rows of them. Covering the entire radius of the filthy, broken-down cottage.
Their hands bashed against the windows. Those fragile, old windows. Multiple hands, with all the strength they had. It wasn’t going to take long.
Gus looked to Donny.
Gus looked to Sadie.
He had one gun on him. Nothing else.
“Do you have any weapons?” Gus whispered to Sadie.
She shook her head.
The front window smashed.
As did the back window.
A fist clattered through the weak wood of the door, revealing the arms of numerous hungry undead.
Gus needed weapons.
They were in the boot of the car. Upturned, about a mile away, on the main carriage of the motorway.
All he had was a Colt. 45 hanging from his waist. It had seven rounds in.
Seven.
That wouldn’t even make a single bit of difference.
The windows smashed to pieces and three zombies fell inside.
Gus withdrew his gun.
He fired a bullet into each of them.
He had four left.
Half of the door broke down, and four more zombies tumbled in.
Two fell over the smashed back window, falling to the floor. Followed by another load. Too many to count.
Gus looked at the gun in his hand.
He looked to his comrades.
The zombies that had just fallen into the cottage got to their feet. They looked at Gus. They licked their mouldy lips. One of them didn’t even have lips. Just sharp, yellow teeth.
They charged at him.
13
For the first time in his life, Gus felt like death was an ominous figure fast approaching.
Of course, he had been scared before. Terrified. Mortified, even.
He had served his country in Afghanistan as one of many soldiers fighting for their lives, in a constant state of unease. He had come face-to-face with the Taliban, who had shown him and his friends no mercy. He’d been inches away from bombs that had blown the chest out of men he would call his brothers. He’d taken bullets from his adversaries, spraying at him like rain in a storm, hailing against the walls as he ran.
But never in those moments of severe fear had he felt like death was not just a constant possibility, but an imminent fate.
In this rotting cottage, with the door broken down and windows smashed in, he felt trapped. The undead were closing in on him, their jaws hung low with bated breath, salivating at the sight of his edible flesh.
He could take one of them. Hell, he could take ten of them if he fought hard enough.
But after that, another ten would come. Then another ten. And another ten.
He decided he had to save his bullets. Saviour his final rounds for himself, Donny, and Sadie. A reality he felt closing in on him at a rapid pace.
He screamed, plunging his fat fist forward into the face of an oncoming zombie, doing all he could not to vomit as he felt it sink through their brains like smush. That member of the walking deceased fell to the floor, but Gus was already surrounded by another circle of them piling toward him, with more waiting if that circle allowed him the unlikely route of survival.
It was no good. He had failed.
A little girl was going to die.
Another little girl.
He would be with his own soon.
He raised the gun to his head.
He looked to Donny, who stared back at him so innocently. Gus saw that look of true fear in Donny’s eyes that he had seen in so many during war. The same look he saw in comrades lying injured on the floor, knowing that death was unavoidable.
His finger traced the trigger.
It was time.
“Yargh!” an unrecognisable snarl spewed aggressively from Sadie’s open jaw.
In an unprecedented leap, she leapt forward and took a large group of the infected to the ground. She dug her paws into their chests and ripped out their insides, throwing their guts as a lasso around the neck of further oncoming assailants.
Gus’s finger paused over the trigger, millimetres from blowing his brains out.
Sadie dove onto the other half of the circle of undead that surrounded Gus. She dug her open jaw into the neck of a nearby beast, ripped out their jugular, then turned to the next three in a movement so quick and so swift it barely even registered in Gus’s brain. She tore through their cheeks with her sharp fingers faster than his eyes could follow.
Recognising that Donny too was surrounded, she dove onto another, digging her teeth into their face and ripping it clean off, driving her fists into the bellies of those that continued to charge at her with enough force to send her fist straight through them.
Gus was once again descended upon, but Sadie recognised the threat and quelled it within seconds, digging her teeth and her claws into a quick succession of charging bodies, ripping them apart and strewing their shredded meat against the wall until their hearts, livers and brains splatted against the crumbling plaster and squelched down the tainted wallpaper, leaving entrails of dark-red gunk.
Gus attempted to plunge his fist into the neck of a zombie with the force that Sadie had. He managed to create a rip, but was unable to send his fist straight through with the same force. There was something about her that gave her another edge; that gave her the quality of a swift animal swiping out its potential predator.
She was faster than them, and quicker than them. It was something Gus had never witnessed, or even expected to be possible.
What did alarm him, however, was
not what she did with her hands, but rather with her teeth. She dug her mouth into their bloody bodies and bloody faces without any regard for how that blood would spread the infection through her. Gus knew that a mixture of zombie blood with his would cause imminent death. She’d torn her teeth through so many of them that the infection would no doubt now be spreading through her blood, readying her for the inevitable change as she became one of them.
She was saving their lives, but at the same time, Gus grew more and more worried that he was going to have to kill her once she turned.
But she didn’t change. She just kept fighting.
And fighting.
And fighting.
With the energy of a raging bull and the movement of a swift lion.
Her movements were unnatural. The precision of her strikes impossible. The strength with which she was able to force through them far greater than her bony appearance would dictate.
He marvelled at her slick ability to tear the undead apart. Before he knew it, he was stood atop an open grave, bodies surrounding his feet, piled atop one another. Created with such fast, blurred movements that Gus was barely able to comprehend that the fight had ended.
She stood still. Breathless. Upon the zombies she had ripped apart with ability he had never conceived to be possible.
In fact, it was not possible. Not possible at all.
For a human.
He exchanged a glance with Donny. A look of alarm and relief, concerned at what Sadie had just managed to do, but pleased to still have their lives.
Sadie crouched, allowing her panting to subside as she surveyed the room of death she had created.
Dark-red blood dripped from her jaw in waves. Pieces of flesh and body parts Gus couldn’t even recognise stuck to her cheeks and dripped down her top like gunks of red mess that looked like a child who had forgotten their bib. She was decorated in violence, concealed in the juices of the infected.
He had seconds. If that.
Gus couldn’t wait.
His arm raised into the air as his gun took aim at her head.
She looked back at him. Her eyes flickered yellow. Her breathing calmed, but the brutal look of a predator stayed. She looked vulnerable yet dangerous. Like a playful lion ready to pounce as soon as it was uncaged.