Year of the Zombie [Anthology]

by David Moody

  ‘What, you think I’m going to leave my kids with you? No bloody way.’

  ‘I’ll be here too,’ Charlie said (and immediately wished she hadn’t).

  ‘No, thanks,’ Jody snapped. ‘No offence, love, but I hardly know you. Like I said, I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Great,’ Gary said, and he shoved his chair back and fetched himself another beer.

  ‘Is that a good idea with everything that’s going on?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Fucking great,’ he said as he stormed out of the room. ‘Now I’ve got both of you moaning at me.’

  They watched him leave. ‘Sorry,’ Jody said to Charlie. ‘That was my fault.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ she said, and it was clear it wasn’t. ‘As it happens, I’m with you. If it was my kids I wouldn’t want to go anywhere either.’

  ‘We can’t stay here indefinitely, though.’

  ‘You can. At least until things have calmed down again, anyway.’

  ‘I think he’d have something to say about that,’ she said, gesturing at the door through which Gary had just disappeared.

  ‘Leave him to me.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ Jody said instinctively. She stopped herself. ‘Sorry. My bad. It’s just that he’s caused me so much shit over the last eighteen months, so much hurt... it’s hard to change my tune just like that, you know?’

  ‘I know. If it’s any consolation, it’s been as hard on him from what I’ve seen. He acts the big man, but I’ve seen him in tears over those kids on more than one occasion.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure you have...’

  ‘Anyway, no more arguments, you’re staying here until this whole sorry mess gets sorted, agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  The conversation faltered, and for a while the silence weighed heavy on the room. ‘So what do we do?’ Jody eventually asked. ‘Do we all just sit here and wait?’

  ‘Don’t see we have much of an option,’ Charlie replied. ‘Way I see it we should—’

  More screams. Upstairs this time. Jody thundered up to the bedrooms, but Gary was there before her. Holly was standing on the landing, soaked through. ‘Nightmare,’ he explained. ‘She wet the bed.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart. It’s okay.’

  Jody instinctively reached out for her daughter but Gary blocked her. ‘I’ve got this,’ he said as he picked up his little girl. She buried her face in his chest, still crying.

  And Jody could only look on helpless as he carried Holly into the bedroom he and Charlie shared and shut the door behind him.

  ◆◆◆

  When Jody next opened her eyes, the unfamiliar house looked more unfamiliar still. The morning light was cold and grey and it felt as if it was being filtered... blocked somehow. After Holly’s nightmare and Gary’s response last night she’d been left feeling unequivocally redundant and had fallen asleep at the kitchen table, head down on a wicker placemat which had covered half her face with indentations and lines. It had hurt being shut out. She struggled with seeing Gary with her children and had to remind herself constantly that they were his kids too. The connection between him and her had been irreparably broken, yet the bond between him and the children was as strong as it had ever been. It made her feel like an intruder. This place where she’d only spent hours, they’d spent days. She was a visitor here, but this house was a part of her children’s lives. It hurt far more than she thought it would have. It bothered her more than anything else that was happening.

  The light down here this morning was weird, though.

  The back of the house was clear. She got up and checked. The garden looked completely normal, save for the surreal remnants of yesterday’s battle: three charred corpses, one all but headless, another still impaled on the garden fork. In her fitful sleep last night, when she’d been flickering between the conscious and unconscious, she’d dreamt they were still coming for her, all crispy skin, burned away muscle and shrivelled up hair. But the infected hadn’t moved, thankfully, and no more had arrived.

  She drank a glass of ice-cold water as she walked through the downstairs of the sprawling house. At the front of the building was a dining room in the middle of renovations. The paper was half-stripped from the walls and a large chimney breast had been knocked out and was in the process of being re-plastered. At first she was distracted trying to imagine what the room would look like when it was finished, but such thoughts were immediately forgotten when she saw a crowd of dead faces gathered at the window. She slowly retraced her footsteps out, praying they hadn’t seen her. She counted six of them up against the glass, blocking most of the light. Clawing. Salivating. Drooling.

  No need to panic, she thought. It was no surprise really. After what had happened in the back garden yesterday, this was only to be expected. It was good in a perverse way, she thought, because by drawing those horrific sick things out into the light, it made them easier for the authorities to round up and get rid of when they finally made it to here.

  Jody climbed the stairs. She needed to pee and to shower so she could start to feel human again. Maybe then she’d check the news and see if progress was continuing to be made or whether the human race was still teetering on the edge of the apocalypse. With a bit of luck, she thought, she might be out of here with the kids and on the way home by the end of today. Funny how the thought of prising the children away from their dad – prolonged goodbyes, tears and tantrums, them not wanting to leave him and him not wanting to let them go – made her feel more anxious than the chaos outside. At least she had Charlie here to help. She seemed a sensible girl (save for the fact she’d shacked up with Gary).

  Jody paused at the top of the stairs and fiddled with the venetian blinds. She had trouble getting them to open – the unfamiliarity of being in someone else’s house. She immediately wished she hadn’t bothered.

  The crowd outside this house wasn’t any worse than it had appeared from downstairs, but there were other small pockets of infection around other houses. One house in particular she noticed, across the road and down a little way, appeared to have been completely surrounded. If there were ‘normal’ people trapped in there, she thought, they had little chance of getting out. Every exit was blocked. Infection and disease at every door and window.

  But it was another house which caught her eye. Directly opposite. The infected there were clamouring around the front door, scratching at it, appearing almost to be squabbling with each other to get inside. And as she watched, she saw it was because the people in the house were reacting. Panicking. An elderly man was visible through a downstairs window. He was brandishing a golf club, ready to use it as a weapon. ‘That’s Derek,’ Gary said, startling her. She spun around and saw him standing behind her, dressed only in a pair of boxers, carrying Holly. He handed her over to her mum and Jody turned back to the window.

  ‘He’d better not be about to do what I think he is,’ she said.

  ‘He’s an arsehole. Proper angry bastard.’

  Jody scowled at his language, but she had to agree. Derek certainly seemed to be an arsehole or at the very least incredibly stupid. He was outside now, having climbed out through his dining room window so he could get behind the infected bodies converging on his front door. Jody covered Holly’s eyes and looked away herself as he started swinging his golf club at the nearest of them, hacking it down.

  Neighbour Derek appeared to be venting all his considerable frustrations on just one of the undead. Think about the blood, you idiot, she silently warned him, but it was too late. The figure was on the ground at his feet now, and what was left of its head was like a deflated football, concave. Contaminated blood was splashing everywhere, soaking Derek’s slippers and his pyjama bottoms.

  The other infected were responding now. It was as if they shared a hive mind, but there was no complex connection between them and no real communication, just the shared instinctive desire to spread their foul disease as far as possible. While Derek was distracted with one of them, four more surrounde
d him. He realised at the last possible moment. Using the head of his bloodied golf club to push another one of them out of the way, Derek tried to fight his way back to the dining room window. The way through was blocked. His wife – ‘Sandra,’ Gary whispered, ‘a real busybody’ – watched helplessly from inside, desperately wanting to help him get in, but at the same time knowing she couldn’t risk opening the window. She gestured furiously towards the front door and, in the midst of the bodies and the sudden madness, Derek ran for it, shoulder-charging more of the creatures out of the way as he did.

  He almost made it, too.

  He reached for the door handle and opened it, just as one of the infected struck. With one outstretched hand, a hideous, loping thing which used to be a woman of similar age and build to Jody grabbed the collar of Derek’s dressing gown and pyjama top and pulled them down. With the other hand she dragged her claws down his back, carving four deep red furrows in his pale and flabby flesh.

  In the end, the fact Derek was now infected didn’t really matter. It was all academic as far as the rest of his family was concerned. He managed to get the door open and half-ran, half-fell inside. He tripped up the step and lay sprawled in his hallway, unable to get up because a veritable flood of crazed dead creatures were trampling over him to get to the others inside.

  Jody turned away, sick to her stomach.

  ◆◆◆

  It was only seven am, but it felt much, much later.

  This uncomfortable, unnaturally extended family had already exhausted all options for the day. Jody found it increasingly difficult to keep up the pretence. Everything’s going to be all right... Mummy and Daddy are getting along just fine...

  Like fuck.

  At least there were promising signs on the news. The fight against the infection had continued overnight, and the spread of the disease had been virtually halted. It was a question now of clearing the infected zone (as they were calling it on TV). Gary and Charlie’s house was smack bang in the middle of the zone, Jody’s house was just on the clean side of the border. Those trapped alongside the infection had two options – stay put and wait for help, or drive to one of the decontamination checkpoints and get the hell out of Dodge. As frustrating as it was, Jody thought the sensible option was to wait.

  She was just about managing to keep her emotions in check when Ben kicked off. He was a smart kid, but prone to losing his temper when things didn’t go his way. And this morning, they hadn’t. It was a load of noise over nothing – an argument over a game controller and who was watching which TV – but all six of them were involved. Jody tried to pacify Ben, then Gary criticised the way she was speaking to him, then Charlie told Gary he was out of order, then Gary told Charlie to butt out, then Jenny told Gary not to be mean, then Ben screamed at Holly because while they’d all been arguing she’d started watching a DVD on the TV he wanted... and so it continued.

  It didn’t matter who started the argument or what it was about, the focus inevitably shifted to Gary and Jody. ‘I need to get out of here,’ Jody said in frustration.

  ‘Probably for the best if you go,’ Gary agreed.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘I can’t stay here.’

  ‘You can. We’ve already had this conversation.’

  ‘No, I can’t. I can’t stay here with him.’

  ‘Best news I’ve heard all morning,’ Gary muttered.

  ‘I’m on fumes, though,’ Jody said, turning her back on her ex and speaking directly to Charlie.

  ‘Not a problem,’ Gary answered, quick as a flash. ‘Charlie’s car’s in the garage. Fill your car from hers.’

  ‘Or just take my car,’ Charlie suggested.

  ‘Even better,’ Gary said.

  ‘I’m not planning on going anywhere for a long time. The keys are hanging up in the kitchen.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Cool. Okay. Thanks. I’ll get all our stuff together and we’ll be out of your way.’

  Gary’s expression changed and he manoeuvred himself back into the centre of the conversation. ‘Wait, wait, wait... what do you mean, we?’

  Surely that was obvious?

  ‘What do you think I mean? Me and the kids.’

  ‘You think I’m going to let you take my kids out into that madness outside?’

  Another trick question?

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I think. It’s not really up to you, is it?’

  ‘Not happening.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. Christ, I’m not happy about you looking after them as it is. Especially not now with all this shit going on.’

  ‘Well the judge was happier with me looking after them than you, remember?’

  Charlie sensed the tension rising rapidly. She’d felt less uncomfortable when the infected had attacked the back of the house yesterday afternoon. She ushered the kids out of the room. ‘Come on, you three, let’s go get you some breakfast sorted.’

  ‘Things have changed...’ Gary started to say before Jody cut across him.

  ‘The judge ruled that the kids stay with me. He said you couldn’t give them the stability or care that I could, remember?’

  ‘That was before all this shit kicked off.’

  ‘What, you think we can forget about the law because the outside world has turned into a horror movie? You think you’re somehow better equipped to cope now?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. The judge made his decision based on the information he had at the time. I’ll admit, I wasn’t in a good place back then.’

  ‘And you think we should reassess now because we’re all in a bad place?’

  ‘I’ve turned things around, Jody, and we both know it. I’m with Charlie, we’ve got this place...’

  ‘She’s got this place. It’s her house, not yours.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’d be able to buy into it if all my money wasn’t still tied up in our old house. If you got off your arse and bought me out then—’

  ‘If I got off my arse?!’ she screamed at him, incensed. ‘You total shit. I can’t go to work and you know it. I’ve got the kids to look after.’

  ‘There you go, then. You piss off and start earning a living, I’ll look after the kids.’

  ‘You absolute fucker. Do you really think it’s that straightforward? It’s not all about material possessions, you know. There’s more to being a parent than that.’

  ‘Oh, spare me.’

  ‘No, you need to hear this. Those kids need a damn sight more than just a roof and a frigging Sony Playstation. They need—’

  Sudden desperate noises from elsewhere silenced their pointless argument. Screams and shouting. Glass shattering. Jody and Gary looked at each other for a split second then ran towards the source of the commotion. It was coming from the dining room. One of the windows in the wide front bay had broken under the weight of the infected pushing in from outside, agitated by the raised voices. A diseased hand was now sticking through the shattered pane, clawing through the air, desperate to get at the untainted people inside. The kids were all in here. Charlie too. She was trying to block the broken window with a plasterer’s board but was struggling to force the diseased arm back out.

  ‘What the hell were the kids doing in here?’ Gary demanded.

  ‘Trying to get away from your arguing,’ Charlie said, pushing hard against the feverish body again. ‘Someone help me for Christ’s sake!’

  Jody moved fast. She pushed the kids in Gary’s direction, then added her weight to the wooden board Charlie was trying to use to block up the window. Between them they managed to cover the hole and hold it tight.

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ Gary said, and he disappeared, all three kids in tow.

  Jody looked over at Charlie, both of them still just about managing to hold the board in place and keep the infected at bay. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Think so.’

  ‘Your boyfriend’s about as useless in a crisis as my ex-h
usband.’

  ‘Funny that,’ Charlie said.

  The infected shoved against them, and they shoved back.

  ‘So do we just stand here like this all day until they get bored and piss off?’

  Before Charlie could reply, Gary returned with a hammer and nails. He pushed his way between them. ‘Hold it steady,’ he said.

  ‘Where are the kids?’ Jody asked.

  ‘Upstairs safe. They’re in Ben’s room. I told them to keep quiet and stay away from the windows.’

  ‘Good.’

  He hammered the board into place, securing it with nails of varying lengths wherever he could – into the wall, the window sill and the window frame itself – and only stopped when he was certain it would hold. Charlie and Jody stepped away, leaving him admiring his own handiwork. ‘That should do it,’ he said, sounding undeservedly smug and self-assured.

  ‘First time I’ve seen you do any DIY in a long time,’ Jody said. ‘Christ, when I think of the grief I used to get whenever I asked you to do anything around the house.’

  ‘Maybe that had more to do with the grief you were always giving me,’ he quickly snapped back, annoyed. ‘You were always on at me... do this, fix that... fucking nagging all the time.’

  ‘Yeah, well that was the problem, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t have had to nag. You should have just done it when it needed doing.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, here we go again. You really can’t help yourself, can you? The world’s falling apart and you’re still trying to score points.’

  ‘I’m not interested in points, I just want to keep my kids safe.’

  ‘And I’ve already told you, they are safe. And they’re staying here with me.’

  ‘Over my dead body.’

  ‘That can be arranged. No one’s going to notice one more corpse at the moment.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have the bloody nerve.’

  ‘You reckon. Just you try me and I’ll—’

  ‘Will you two just shut up!’ Charlie screamed at them.