The Pestilence Collection [Books 1-3]

by Rob Cockerill

  “Daddy, help!” Tam cried. His attention distracted, Jack was bowled over by the dominant walker, throwing itself at its prey in haste rather than any cunning. He was pinned to the floor by what felt like an almost 90kg of raging cadaver, and grew anxious at both the struggle to wrestle himself free and the thought of his fallen blade lying just out of reach to his right. Snapping and snarling, the crazed zombie sensed the blood now coursing through Jack’s veins, getting to within an inch of his gruff cheek. He writhed and wriggled, unarmed and beginning to show signs of fading in the fight.

  Nic instinctively shepherded her younger siblings behind her and shielded them from attack to the rear, but could see that her father was flagging and potentially only seconds from taking a perilous hit. He needed her and with tears strewn down her face, she made her decision and raced toward him. It was too late; Jack got his second wind and began his comeback against the pressing cadaver. Wedging his right leg between the attacker’s torso and his own, with surprising back-lift he used his foot to launch the biter backwards. It fell like a great oak, crashing to the ground shoulder first in a heap. Threatening to come back for more with its back arched and forearms jacking up its decaying frame, Jack sprang to his feet and pounced, launching into the back of the monster and pressing it into the stony path. In one ruthless attack he ripped at the corpse’s greying hair and slammed its growling head into the ground. Reclaiming his knife from the sodden leaves he struck an impaling blow to the back of its cranium and straight through the cerebral cortex, the final act of its sorry life being a deep roar that filled every wooded hamlet of the trail.

  But Jack soon realised that it wasn’t his victims’ dying groan that rippled through the trees. A lone biter had plunged its mouldering teeth into Nic’s neck, overpowering her and pushing ever deeper into the thyroid cartilage, ripping great chunks out of her clavicle with every mouthful. Nic screamed until her larynx was destroyed, blood spraying out into the air as the thriving attacker gorged itself on her flesh, pausing only to let out a victorious howl like a feral wolf in mid-hunt. Near dead anyway, Nic passed out as Tam and Riley ran back into the arms of their father.

  ..…

  That, reader, was my very vivid damn nightmare last night. I may have had a fever over the last few days that has robbed me of lucid thought and left me burning up and tripping out at night, but my head is clearly getting seriously fucked by all of this. It was so detailed; it felt so real. The moment I woke up with a sweat drenched T-shirt and uncontrollable shaking, I lumbered like the corpses we so fear down the corridor and into the main commune of the base to check that everyone was okay. There they were – Jack, Jenny, Nic, Tam and Riley – all tucking into their modest helpings of sugary porridge, our simple morning staple, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

  I have always been mentally strong, but there’s so much mental torture going on in these days that I just don’t know much more my mind will let me absorb. That nightmare was clearly based upon our now impending departure from the base out into the overgrown woodlands. It was clearly the product of my inner fears. And there is every possibility in these dark and desperate days that it will transpire when we do head out into the open. My fever has granted us a temporary reprieve in our plans to leave; I almost wish it was here to stay.

  31st July 2016

  With my feverish conditions all but cleared up and our parting of ways with this former military base ever nearer, Jack decided the moment had come for him to reveal where he had taken his family all those months ago when this apocalypse first began.

  Quite why he chose to tell us this morning, I’m still not sure. Was it a coded message? Was he implying that being out on the road is too dangerous? Did he simply feel the need to finally unburden himself and get it off his chest? I still think there was more to it, but whatever the motive, I remember every single word.

  “The way I saw it, you need either height or depth. Distance won't be enough. You need a natural barrier that they can't overcome. If you're underground or above ground, they can't see you – you don't exist. And up high, they can't ably get to you either.

  So I had the idea to head to Gylly Pit. You won't have heard of it. If you have, you'll only know it as the 'Lost Church'. Ring any bells? It's an old church, one of the only ones in the country built facing the wrong way – unlike most religious buildings, it's south facing rather than north, and it was deconsecrated years and years back. No-one knows all this, not these days. It was so long ago that it’s not even the stuff of local legend anymore; it’s just faded into history. Anyway, when it was deconsecrated, some developers got hold of the land and built up around It, and the church was basically buried – it became 'lost'. The last I’d ever heard of it, when I was not much older than Nic, it was still intact but buried beneath stacks of earth.

  It's the perfect underground hideaway; no-one knows about it, it'll be empty, it's been beneath the surface for nearly 50 years, and you could survive down there for years, I reckon. So that's what I tried to do. I tried to be clever. I thought I could save my family by taking us there for a while and riding this all out. Problem is, it's about 30 miles from here and we faced issues at every step of the way. Every road, every junction seemed to be blocked by something; whether it was cars or animals or even smashed up buildings. Every time we took a different way around, that back road or byway would be blocked too. And every time we had to stop and turnaround, we had to find somewhere to park up and spend the night in the van. You couldn't risk being near any roadblock or back road outhouse – any shit could have gone down there, any corpses might be hanging around.

  And that’s how we lost so many weeks and months, literally stuck between a rock and a hard place, getting more and more hungry and tired and teasy every day. Everything we tried went wrong. On every road we took we were confronted with trouble. Even when we turned back and decided to return to Porthreth, we had issues. That’s how we came to grief; stopping to clear chaotic roadblocks and picking over the wreckage of others, we were exposed to whatever fucking creatures were hanging around. That’s how we lost…”

  That was it. Jack was done confessing. He rose to his feet and with a deep sigh, he trudged off outside for some air. They never made it to Gylly Pit. They never made it anywhere really, not even home. Perhaps that’s why Jack has always been so keen to make this base the closest thing to a ‘home’ that any of us could call upon in 2016. And by the time they had found us, they were without their wife and mother. That’s the risk of the pursuit of something better; that you will be held up and waylaid, that you will come to grief, that you will lose loved ones along the way. We’ve seen it ourselves, so much so that our death count still haunts me in harrowing flashbacks almost every night that I retire to sleep.

  Even the living occupy my thoughts. I still think about the survivors twitching at their curtains as we ran past – I wonder if they are still surviving. I still think about that plucky band of brothers holed up in the village church and ask myself, could they really still be resisting the unrelenting moans and groans in there? I still think of all of those we have encountered along the way and wonder, did they set off in pursuit of a safer place and meet their maker?

  Few seem to survive the pestilence. Whether Jack intended to deliver a subliminal message or not this morning, we would do well to remember his story as well as he does.

  5th August 2016

  So, it's early August. The start of another calendar month in this morbid world we call the apocalypse; the seventh I have seen get underway since it all began, and this one no different to any of the rest, perhaps just darker.

  Lashing rain storms of 1-2 days at a time continue to punctuate the summer and bring it to its knees before it can even get going. Still, the heavy rains do always dampen the rising tide of putrid decay hanging in the she, so I guess we should be thankful for small mercies.

  With the latest of the wet and wintry weather behind us for the time being, we are all set to head out on the
open road for pastures new. Our target? Porthreth Vean House. I never thought it would come to this, but it is. Three days from now, when we are all packed, set and ready to go, we will bid farewell to the base in the dawn sunlight and make our best attempt to get out of here. We have plans all on ice for diversions and distractions, including whistles, fires and what remains of our flare gun, and we will make the best of it.

  Tomorrow, as part of those plans, I’ll be heading out on the trail with Jack to clear the worst of the overgrown shrubbery and bramble-laden pathways, for about the first two miles of the journey ahead. It will at least give us a good head start on that dawn departure, and hopefully from there we will have made solid progress toward the village itself.

  .....

  I have spent a great many nights lying awake and wondering what the coming weeks and months hold, as I well imagine Jenny has, and Jack too. Perhaps even Nic has lay awake with such worry.

  All manner of thoughts has run wild through my head in that time, and my relatively learned mind has allowed me to curate the most meaningful of those. The page turner is of course the featurettes of thinking, the in-depth concerns for our future and that of our unborn child. How, where and for how long will we all survive? But the grit in that curation is more the news pages; the thoughts and theories on how this apocalypse began - and how it might be brought to an end.

  A great deal of thought provocation was inspired amidst my many feverish hallucinations and nightmares last week. Having talked them through with Jenny, we’ve come up with some pretty wild musings! But we do think we might have stumbled across one credible theory along the way…

  It’s clear that suspect activity had been monitored at Porthreth military base – that much we know for sure. The site, clearly part of a surveillance network likely spanning the country, sent reports back to a central station for assessment. Either the threat was so severe that a deterrent was manufactured and ultimately went wrong, resulting in the pestilence, or the threat itself was the pestilence. What price on the virus or disease actually originating from here, in deepest, darkest Cornwall, in the first place? Further still, we’re wondering if that initial threat was seconded here for analysis and was essentially mutated – accidentally or otherwise – here in the labs at this very chemicals base.

  Jack dismissed it as folly (his wording was not as kind as that), as too obvious and simple. Something as deeply destructive and final as this must have far more complex, conceited origins, he argued. He also insisted we were just trying to shoehorn humble Porthreth's military base into the equation when it most likely has no significance whatsoever. Maybe he’s right. But far stranger things have happened and as we know all too well this year, far sinister things can happen too.

  Perhaps the theory needs more thought; I can’t help thinking we’re missing something and it will all come to us soon enough. Conversely, maybe we will never know at all. One thing’s for certain, we will be leaving this grand and secure place in just a couple more days, and you always learn something – whether it’s about yourself or about the world around you – by doing something new. Whether it’s something we want to learn, well that’s another thing altogether.

  8th August 2016

  Now, I think there is little doubt that I am a killer.

  If that question has plagued me since early February and haunted my almost every nightfall, today all doubt was removed. I bumped into an apparently twisted man named Ezrah and, after a disturbing altercation, was forced to butcher him in the thick of the woodland.

  Jack and were out clearing an initial two-mile stretch of the old tramway trail as much as possible before Jenny, Nic, Tam and Riley have to embark upon it with us in the next couple of days. We’d made good progress, heading out at dawn and getting a good couple of miles into the woods within the first hour or so and then beginning the arduous task of cutting back the vegetation, slowly working our way back to the base. This was more than just a light pruning – we spent hours hacking back the brambles and branches, the dense hogweed and nettles.

  Our footprint had spanned nigh on the full two miles and we were all but done for the day when I was confronted quite out of the blue by a panicked, slightly dangerous-looking man immediately wielding a large blade and ‘looking for help’. He looked dishevelled and wild; not just unshaven and scruffy, but imposing for his modest frame and with a crazed look protruding from his oak brown eyes. Despite his ostensible plea for help, he wore an aggressive, irrational air about him. His ruse of appeal would almost instantly prove to be superficial.

  He certainly chose his moment. Jack was ‘taking a leak’ not too far away in the trees and brambles when Ezrah sprang out in front of me, blade tightly clenched in hand and asking very clearly and concisely to be taken back to our home. He demanded to share whatever we have with him, no shame nor humility – and no margin for negotiation. I refused, and reasoned that we knew nothing of him nor his origins. But he grew more and more animated, babbling louder and louder about how very much he knew of us; he had been watching us ‘for some time’ he asserted, waving the bloodied blade around in front of me. I refused again, in the knowledge that Jack had been startled by the commotion and begun to make his way over, the view from the corner of my eye assuring me that he had already drawn his own blade in anticipation.

  I tried again to reason with this Ezrah, I attempted to calm the situation and explain it was nothing personal – we would not be taking any strangers on at the minute, I said, we are about to cut loose and could not afford to be held up, weighed down or otherwise on our trip. Why else would we be out here? I added. But Ezrah’s sinister underbelly grew hungrier and hungrier. He didn’t want to reason, there was no time nor inclination for discourse. He spewed veiled threats toward our loved ones and less cloudy warnings in my direction, now attracting much more attention than Jack; crowds of corpses began to head our way from all angles.

  As his ranting ramped up and his eyes raged stormier, this possessed man took two steps toward me and visibly gripped his blade tighter. Without warning, he suddenly ran into the ten-feet space between us with his blade ready to joust my midriff. Before I could blink he lost his footing right before me on a clumsy patch of wet earth and fell forlornly toward my feet. My life flashed before me as he still tried to fulfil a mortal blow of my midsection, missing and instead delivering a light slashing to my right knee. Blood spewed forward like his callous threats and in those moments I thought the worst – I thought he had somehow caught me as intended. As his jaw smashed into the muddy terrain beneath me I lost it – I completely lost it and buried my bramble-banishing axe into his right shoulder, impaling him to the ground. His blade scattered as the nerves in his arm flickered and contorted, his grip lost and his whole body writhing around his skewered arm.

  From there, I don’t completely know what happened. I just remember blood shooting up into the air around us as I jumped onto his back, took his head by the hair and repeatedly slammed it into the ground, over and over again. The final blow was a measly kitchen knife plunged through the back of his head and into the brain. Countless shades of bloody fluids gushed into the air like a soda stream and his body shivered and shook beneath my kneel until it stopped abruptly – no more jerking, no more writhing, and no more malice. It was all extinguished below me. The man named Ezrah was no more. As I fell to the bloody ground beside my attacker, I could see a sweaty, dizzy haze descend as Jack appeared to battle countless cadavers in my fading peripheral vision. And with that, I was gone.

  …..

  When I awoke, I was safely nestled in the dorms of the base, blanketed and bandaged around the knee. I could feel it applying constant pressure to the scene of the wound. And it dawned on me what I had done, how I angrily and instinctively butchered a man and ripped the life right out of him. I could hear Jack giving that very recount to a distressed Jenny in another room.

  I had crossed the line and in doing so, I am now officially a killer. A slayer of men, not mutilated corps
es; an actual killer, plain and simple. What have I become?

  Jane, the local councillor, was not directly on my conscience. Technically nor was Jake 'Dog' Penberthy when he was savaged from ear to ear right in front of my face; I didn't kill him, I just didn't save him. Despite the fact that I see them in my tired hours every single day and night, I did not murder them or was directly involved in their passing. They made their own mistakes, they made foolish moves on their own panic, and I was powerless to stop them. I see the haggard, haunting face of almost every member of the undead army that I have slayed too, but they do not trouble my mind the same way as Ezrah does – they were already dead, after all.

  This is altogether different, though.

  I don’t regret it. I felt threatened. I was threatened. And so were my family. I was not about to let Jenny and my unborn baby down. Nor was I about to leave Nic, Tam and Riley open to attack. I wasn’t going to let myself or Jack get injured, or worse, not today. I put us and everything about us first, and put an end to anything that threatened us in any way, right there and then.

  It was more than just a casual, desperate attack. It was far more than that. This guy was menacing and warped. I honestly feared he would slaughter me there and then, without a second's thought. Despite their relative mismatch in build and physicality, I thought he would slay Jack too; Jack is more than capable and a fearsome man to cross, but there's no telling what a genuinely crazed person can do. They don't have the same kill switch, they don't have the rationale or presence of sound thought anymore – they're insanity renders them just about the closest thing to a killing machine as we're likely to see. And I say that as someone who has survived an all-encompassing apocalypse of the undead for the last seven months.