He went upstairs to the bedroom and picked up his binoculars. He put them to his eyes and studied the faces of the zombies standing around the perimeter of his farm. He caught himself and swore. He’d promised himself not to use that word to describe them. The poor wretches who stood just outside the electrified fence and watched the house with their slack-jawed, imbecilic but hungry expressions were creatures dragged from his worst nightmares.
He started as he saw a flash of green in the distance. He refocused the binoculars and looked again. There was a vehicle moving along the road, heading down towards the farm. It was a Land Rover, olive green, its windscreen protected by a makeshift steel grille. Peering out from behind the grille was a girl with dark hair tied back from her face. She was watching the road with a ferocious intensity, her eyes darting from side to side, scanning the undergrowth either side of the lane.
She didn’t have Maguire’s advantage of seeing the lane from higher up, so as she approached she had no idea that the zombies were secreting themselves behind bushes and trees, slow idiot hunters lying in wait for their prey.
The girl in the Land Rover reached the fence and stopped. Maguire watched her for a long minute, watching her as she watched the farmhouse. She made a movement as though she was about to open the door. At the same time the undead creatures lurking in the trees moved forward slightly with anticipation. They could smell the hot, sweet blood of a healthy human.
‘No!’ The word broke from Maguire’s lips as he realised that the girl was about to get out of the vehicle to an almost certain death.
He wheeled away from the window and ran from the room. He took the stairs two at a time, nearly missing his footing and falling the rest of the way. He hammered into the anteroom and shut down the generator, then ran on into the kitchen and grabbed his shotgun, scooping up a handful of cartridges and dropping them into his pocket.
By the time he’d opened the bolts of the front door and pulled the door open the girl was out of the Land Rover and standing looking through the fence to the house. Already the zombies were creeping out from the undergrowth. The one who had once been Tony Fisher, the policeman, positioned himself between her and the Land Rover, effectively cutting off her escape.
The girl realised she was in serious trouble at the same time that Maguire broke from the house, yelling at the top of his lungs. He ran towards the fence, shouldering the shotgun, and loosed off a shot wide of the girl. The blast took Eric Stapleton off his feet, removing his arm at the shoulder in the process.
The girl looked at Maguire’s approaching form with alarm, then screamed as one of the zombies grabbed her wrist and jerked her arm upwards towards its salivating mouth.
She yanked her arm away, lashing out with her other hand, catching the zombie on the side of the head, making it release its grip. But she was badly out-numbered and knew it.
‘Help me!’ she cried out to Maguire as he fired another shot. This one blasted Tony Fisher’s head from his body, the head itself exploding like an old disused wasps’ nest, disintegrating into a grey, powdery cloud, dry and dusty, no blood.
As he approached he slipped another two cartridges into the shotgun and fired both of them; not aiming, just using the noise to scare them and make them release their grip on the girl. Where she’d pulled up in the Land Rover there was a makeshift gate in the fence. It was barely indistinguishable from the rest of the fence, and the power flowed through it so it was just as hard to breach.
He untwisted the two wires holding it in place, yanked it open, and then spun the shotgun around in his hands so he was holding the barrel. Then, using the headstock as a club, he forced his way through the zombies until he could grab the girl. She was swinging her fists, but was hopelessly surrounded. Eric Stapleton got to his feet once more and, untroubled by his missing arm, grabbed the girl by the hair. Maguire smashed him in the face with the headstock of the rifle, hearing a satisfying crack as the heavy wood split the skull.
Stapleton toppled backwards. Maguire pulled the girl through the gap in the fence and slammed the makeshift gate shut, twisting the two wires back in place. Then, panting loudly, trying to get his breath back, used another two cartridges to drive the zombies backwards to give himself enough time to get back inside and start the generator again.
The girl was crying as she followed Maguire back to the house. She was clutching the ignition keys in her hand so tightly they had broken the skin.
‘How could I have been so stupid?’ she said as she closed the farmhouse door behind her.
Maguire said nothing but disappeared into the anteroom to restart the generator. The girl moved to the window and looked out. The creatures that weren’t swarming over the Land Rover were paying special attention to the body of Tony Francis, ripping pieces from it and stuffing the matter into their mouths. One of the more enterprising zombies was fumbling with the gate; trying to unwind the wire with which Maguire had secured it.
His face registered nothing as he freed one piece and dropped it to the ground.
‘They’re breaking through!’ the girl called to Maguire. In the anteroom Maguire sweated as he tried to bring the generator back to life. Each time he tried the motor refused to catch. The girl appeared in the doorway. ‘One of them’s untying the gate,’ she said.
Maguire looked up at her and glared as if to say, What the hell do you expect me to do about it? But he remained tight-lipped.
The girl approached the generator. ‘Shouldn’t that be switched to on,’ she said, pointing to the tap on the fuel pipe.
He must have caught the safety cutout in his rush to turn the generator off. He flipped the switch over and tried the motor again. It started first time. From outside they heard a guttural scream as the creature attempting to undo the gate was hit by the full force of electricity as it surged back through the fence.
‘Thanks,’ Maguire said gruffly. His voice sounded strange to his own ears and he wondered how long it was since he’d spoken. Probably not since Jenny died, he thought.
He went back into the kitchen and looked out at the fence. The creatures had backed away from the electricity and were pulling the Land Rover apart. The seats were out, lying by the side of the vehicle, and one of the creatures was staring at himself in the rear-view mirror held in his rotting, grey hand.
He ran up the stairs and checked the perimeter fence with the binoculars. It seemed intact – no breaches in his defences, and he could see no creatures in the gap between the fence and the house. When he came down again the girl was staring moodily out at her Land Rover. She was tossing the keys in her hand. Suddenly she spun around and hurled the keys at the wall, missing Maguire’s head by inches. ‘Careful,’ he said.
‘Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should be dead. If it hadn’t have been for you I would be.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m Maguire, James Maguire. You are?’
‘Claire Thomas.’
He was aware he stank – it did not take the wrinkling of her nose to tell him. He wiped his palm on the side of his grubby jeans and stuck it out.
She shook it.
‘Where are you from, Claire?’ he asked.
‘Oxford. I was working as a carer at a nursing home there. That was until the sickness hit. Out of sixty residents and half as many staff, I was the only one who didn’t go down with it.’
‘You were lucky.’
‘I thought so too at first. Now I’m not so sure.’
He rounded on her. ‘Don’t ever say that! Would you rather end up like them?’ he said, gesturing to the window. He sat down heavily at the kitchen table and rubbed his face with his hands. With a sigh he pulled them away and looked up at her bleakly. ‘So what’s it like out there? I take it you didn’t come straight here from Oxford.’
‘No, I tried a number of places first, but it’s the same everywhere. There are pockets of survivors everywhere, but most of them would not let me get near. Most of them are armed – all of them are hostile to anyone not part of their particular
group.’ She looked about the kitchen. ‘I don’t suppose I could have a cup of tea, could I?’
Maguire laughed out loud. The sound seemed strange to him, but then it was months since he’d had anything to laugh about. ‘The great British cure-all,’ he said as he filled the kettle from a water container and set it to boil on the range. ‘Wars have been won by the British belief in tea as the great restorative.’
‘Tea also lost us America... symbolically at least.’
He stopped laughing. ‘Point taken,’ he said.
Later, while Claire slept on the couch in the lounge, Maguire took himself up to the bathroom, and with some of his precious water he washed himself from head to toe, including his hair. Then with a pair of nail scissors he got to work on the beard, hacking off the bristles close to the skin, then finishing off with a reasonably sharp razor. It wasn’t until the last of the beard was leaving his face that he realised what he was doing. He might try to convince himself that he was simply fulfilling a basic human function in cleaning his body, but the truth, as he well knew, was that he was doing it for someone else, and for a woman. Not to impress, surely, but not to repulse either.
As he patted cold water onto his face he looked at himself in the mirror. His skin was sallow, and there were dark half-moon shadows beneath his eyes. The eyes themselves were tired and there was a hunted look in them. It wasn’t the face to instil, or inspire, confidence, and he hoped the girl wasn’t going to look to him for any heroics. It was as much as he could do to keep body and soul together. Losing Jenny had liberated him in a way. It made him self-reliant, possibly even selfish. Their marriage was happy, if not exhilarating. In the dark lonely nights when he sat listening to the grunts and animal noises from the other side of the fence he missed Jenny and her companionship. In truth, though, his loss was not as difficult to bear as he might have imagined. All those times, over so many long years, when he’d considered what life would be like without her, had prepared him for a solitary existence. Even so he was surprised at the anticipation Claire’s arrival had awoken within him.
Claire awoke to the smell of sizzling bacon. She wandered sleepy-eyed out into the kitchen.
‘I was just coming to wake you,’ Maguire said.
She looked at him carefully. ‘You look ten years younger without the beard,’ she said.
‘It’s funny, I always hated beards – never thought I’d have one. The eggs are powdered, by the way, so I’ve scrambled them.’
‘And the bacon?’
‘Emergency rations. It won’t be a regular occurrence.’
She smiled. ‘You say that as though you expect me to stay.’
He turned his back on her, concentrating on flipping the bacon in the pan. ‘Stay or go, it’s just the same to me. Obviously you can look after yourself out there, or else you wouldn’t have got this far.’
She put a hand on his shoulder and turned him to face her. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t want to go. Yours is the first friendly face I’ve seen in weeks... God knows it’s the first human face I’ve seen in weeks. I’m not going to walk away from it… that is so long as you can put up with me here. You owe me nothing.’
He turned back to the bacon and flipped it out onto a plate. He gave the scrambled eggs a stir and divided it between them. ‘Not haute cuisine I’m afraid, but the best I can do in the present circumstances.’
‘It’s a banquet,’ she said. ‘A veritable feast.’
He put the plates down on the table and they sat and ate in virtual silence. He’d boiled some coffee and it wasn’t until they’d drunk half a pot that they spoke again.
Claire asked him about his life before the sickness, and he told her about Jenny, about the farm, about his time at agricultural college before that.
‘They told us there that we were the backbone of England, and I must admit it was a romantic ideal – growing food to feed a nation. They made it seem like a noble occupation... a vocation, almost.’
‘I can tell from the irony in your voice that it wasn’t.’
‘Had the sickness not struck when it did, I suppose we could have hung on for another six months. At the end, Jenny was working behind the bar at The Feathers four nights a week just to put food on the table. Feeding a nation… there’s a laugh. We could barely feed ourselves.’
The conversation was halted by a crash from below them.
Maguire gripped the side of the table and pushed himself to his feet. ‘They’re in the house,’ he said.
He approached the door to the cellar, the shotgun cradled over his arm, his finger stroking the trigger. Glancing back over his shoulder he said to Claire, ‘Keep a watch up here. I think the doors are strong enough to keep them out, and I shuttered the windows while you were asleep, so you should be safe.’
Her face was white and there was fear in her eyes. It was the fact you could not reason with the creatures that scared her so much. They were brainless, driven only by their hunger for flesh and their thirst for blood. She’d seen her younger brother turn and attack her father, biting a large piece out of the older man’s neck until her mother caved her son’s skull with a poker. Claire shivered at the memory.
Maguire rested his hand on the doorknob and turned it gently. Silently he pushed open the door, stretched his hand inside and switched on the light.
He recoiled as he found himself staring into the dead eyes of one of the O’Sullivan brothers who was half way up the cellar stairs. His sibling was at the bottom of the stairs, the still wriggling body of a large rat gripped in his hand. He put the rat’s head in his mouth and bit down, severing it from the still writhing body. Maguire gagged as blood spurted out of the brother’s mouth. Then he raised the shotgun to his shoulder and fired into the face of the brother on the stairs. The blast blew the man’s head apart and he tumbled backwards, colliding with his brother at the bottom, sending him sprawling backward, the rat’s lifeless, headless body flying through the air.
Maguire rushed down the stairs with a cry, put the barrel of the shotgun against the other brother’s head and pulled the trigger. The sound of the gunshot in such a confined space was deafening, and it was a few seconds before he heard Claire’s voice screaming from above.
As he ran back up the stairs he fumbled in the pocket of his shirt, his fingers closing around two more cartridges. He broke the gun and loaded it, wishing now he had sawn the barrels down to make the weapon more manoeuvrable.
When he reached the ground floor he saw that the front door was open. There was a figure silhouetted in the doorway – a man, his face grey and gaunt, the eyes opaque, white-filmed. The mouth was open, giving the face a vacuous expression and revealing blackened teeth.
Maguire did not recognise him. He wasn’t local. He blasted him with two barrels in the face and reloaded.
In the lounge Claire was grappling with Jean Luff. Jean, the placid grandmother, local post-mistress and pillar of the church had her teeth buried in Claire’s shoulder and was making a keening sound that set Maguire’s nerves on edge. He was still trying to work out how they had got past the fence. Claire’s gaze met his. There was terror and despair in her pale grey eyes.
He reversed the shotgun and drove the stock into Jean Luff’s face, shattering her cheekbone and making her release her grip on Claire’s shoulder, and then he spun the shotgun in his hands and squeezed the trigger.
Jean Luff’s head exploded, spattering them with dust and bone. The headless carcass dropped to the floor where it twitched a couple of times then was still.
Without giving it a second glance Maguire ran to the front door. He glanced out quickly to see if there were any others, but the rest of the creatures were still on the other side of the fence.
He was suddenly angry with Claire. If she hadn’t turned up in her bloody Land Rover he would never have shut off the electricity, and the zombies would never have got inside the fence. He was angry also that she must have opened the front door and let in Jean Luff and th
e other creature. Now he’d used all his ammunition and was defenceless. All he had left was the single cartridge in the pouch hanging around his neck. And he wasn’t going to use that… yet. He went back in the lounge and all his anger evaporated.
Claire was kneeling on the floor, hugging herself, singing softly, crooning a lullaby to the dead body of Jean Luff, as tears poured steadily down her cheeks. Her shirt was torn at the shoulder and he could see blood beneath it where Jean’s teeth had ripped Claire’s skin. He crouched down next to her and wrapped an arm around her, coaxing her to her feet. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go out to the kitchen. I’ll put the kettle on.’
She looked up at him, sniffed back the tears and nodded.
‘I need to look at that shoulder,’ he said, as she sipped the hot sweet coffee he’d made for her.
So far she’d said nothing, not even when he’d put the cup down in front of her. She was in deep shock.
Maguire went to the cupboard under the sink and pulled out a green plastic first aid box. He unclipped the catches and opened it. The contents were sparse, but at least there was a bottle of iodine and some gauze.
She unbuttoned her shirt and dropped it down to reveal the wound. Maguire hissed. It was worse than he had first thought. There was actually a piece of flesh missing. He would have to act quickly to cleanse the wound before infection set in. If he left it too late and blood poisoning developed Claire was as good as dead. In the first aid-box he found a small cellophane envelope containing sterile thread and a needle. He palmed them in his hand and went back to the lounge. He rummaged through a cupboard, his fingers closing around the neck of a bottle of vodka. He returned to the kitchen and poured several fingers of the alcohol into Claire’s coffee. ‘Drink that. Then I’ll make you some more.’
Falling Into Heaven Page 12