Death Plague [Four Zombie Novels]

by Ian Woodhead

  “Thank you for coming,” gurgled a voice.

  I glimpsed a flash of green, the weight on my back vanished, and then I saw nothing.

  Chapter Ten

  Dying Seeds

  It’s really surprising how a simple image from my past had the power to revitalise my supposedly dead emotions. I skidded to a halt as the building came into view. The tip of my boot smashed into a wall and a precariously balanced lump of concrete smashed onto the pavement.

  The noise of the masonry hitting the floor sound thunderous in the silent town, and we both automatically assumed the crouch position with our eyes scanning this desolate landscape for any sign of movement.

  “You clumsy oaf,” hissed Danielle.

  I shrugged before standing up. Our efforts were wasted, and from what we had been able to discover already, this place hadn’t seen passersby for a long time. Still, habits were hard to break, especially when those habits had saved the pair of our skins for such a long time.

  “There’s no greenery, Danielle; that’s not right.”

  My sister slowly nodded, but she didn’t say anything, and I suspect that she knew the reason why. Probably the same reason as to why she led us back home. I wanted to think that her sole purpose in bringing us back to the town where we grew up was to help me sort out my messed up head. Perhaps that was one motivation as to why, but she had another purpose, and she had no intention of sharing. Not that I was all that concerned, After eleven years, I was used to her habit of keeping everything close to her chest. I put it down to her sex. My mother was just the same, always up to something.

  “You’re smiling, Colin.”

  “Oh, you’ve noticed?” I smiled even more. “Too right I am. Just look at where we are.”

  “I know where we are, for crying out loud. It was my idea to come back here, remember?”

  The eleven years hadn’t been kind to what used to be my favourite sweet shop. Black and grey ruled where once garish reds and greens were king. To the untrained eye, the shop looked like the rest in this row of stone buildings. I guessed that most of the damage must have occurred in the first few weeks after the outbreak looting. Why on earth anybody would want to steal from a sweet shop was beyond me. Mars bars and Sherbet Lemons weren’t exactly part of the main food groups.

  The shop was now a slave to time and weather, but I looked past that, and I stared at the shattered shop front, remembering how it used to look.

  Every single day without fail at exactly ten minutes after school had closed, you would have found me in there, either browsing through the comics or pondering what sweets to get to eat after supper.

  I drooled at the memory of the huge amount of goodies stocked in the tiny shop. The shopkeeper, Mr Singh, was very tolerant of my extended stays. As long I didn’t get in the way of his customers, he’d let me stay as long as I wished.

  Looking back, it sounded like I lived a pretty lonely life as a kid. I guess I was never much of a social butterfly. My sister had inherited that particular talent. She had tons of friends. “Danielle, what do you suppose happened to the shopkeeper?”

  She shrugged. “Does it matter? The same as everybody else, really. There’s not much to choose from, Colin. He either turned, was bitten and turned, bitten and eaten, or he’s still around wondering where his next meal is coming from. Take your pick.”

  I should have known, that would have been my response. Ever the practical, having no time for whimsical ideas. Strange really, considering back before the outbreak, she was more of a dreamer than anyone in our family.

  We continued walking down the middle of the high street, each building triggering a memory. Some good and some bad, but each one stripped away the layers of miasma that had built up ever since I had last feasted on human flesh. I shivered even now; I could remember how good it felt as their warm meat slid down my throat.

  “Are you okay?”

  I started. “Yeah, sorry. I was lost in the past for a moment there.” Mum used to take us to that coffee shop every Saturday afternoon, do you remember?”

  “Oh yeah, she made a point to buy us both a sandwich and a milkshake. God, I miss the taste of milkshake.”

  I smiled to myself, glad of her input. She inadvertently pushed my more recent thoughts back to where they belonged. “I never understood why she did that. I mean, the stuff she bought us were so expensive.” I pointed to a building on the corner. “Remember that one? Mum’s favourite discount shop. Well, they had sandwiches and milkshakes, and they were like a quarter of the price.”

  Danielle shook her head. “Unbelievable, you really don’t get it.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me away. “Come on, you, let’s keep moving.”

  I blinked, wondering what I’d said wrong. I smiled again, not that it mattered. I felt pretty good, and judging from my sister’s reaction, she looked happy to be back here as well. I won’t lie. I have missed the place, and even in this state, it felt as though we had come home.

  Danielle and I were born and brought up in this suburb of our great capital. Consequently, we were more comfortable in a mall, a skatepark, an amusement arcade, or in my case, a sweetshop. To us, grass and trees were what you found in gardens.

  Perhaps that was one contributory factor as to me feeling so good. We both learned right at the beginning that staying in the urban areas was the equivalent of walking into the middle of a tiger pit.

  We, like the rest of our species in England, were a nation of consumers. Our food and supplies came from the shops. Living off the land was something we only saw on TV. So it made sense that the survivors would stay in the towns and cities, close to where the food was. It made them easy prey for the shambling dead.

  Danielle stopped opposite the flyblown entrance to the Mall. I opened my mouth, ready to ask her if she was ready to tell me why we had come back, when she spun around and dug her fingers into my shoulders.

  “Tell me what you can hear, Colin.” She shook her head. “No, scratch that idea. Tell me what you can sense.”

  I closed my eyes and focussed on the building in front of us; my talent for spotting other minds, either dead or living had exploded since that last meal. Lately, though, I have been finding my sphere contracting. Right now, I could barely reach the entrance. “I can’t sense anything.”

  “Thought you wouldn’t. This place truly is a ghost town. Just like the others I’ve scouted.”

  “Wait, you mean you’ve been to other towns?”

  “Of course I have. Where do you think your food’s been coming from?”

  Even after the shock of finding out that I was a hunter, Danielle still insisted on looking after me. To be honest, I was happy with the arrangement. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself if I bumped into another human survivor. “Wait, is this related to the reason as to why there’s hardly any plants here?”

  She nodded. “Probably.”

  That hadn’t made any sense to me. When she suggested that we ought to pay a visit here, I expected vines discovering the buildings, and weeds, grass, and shrubs pushing up through the tarmac and concrete. The ground under my feet was buckled alright, yet I saw no sign of anything green; it was as if the soil had been sterilised.

  Danielle smiled. “Listen very carefully. I need you to make your way home, and wait for me there.”

  “What?” I jumped back, completely shocked by this mental poleaxe. “What are you talking about? I’m not going to leave you.”

  She sighed. “Don’t be a baby, it won’t be for long.”

  “But why?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t ask, Colin.” She wrapped her arms around my waist and kissed me on the nose. “Just do this for me, hun.”

  With that, she released me, turned around, and jogged towards the Mall doors. I watched her climb though one of the smashed windows, and I stayed there until her form had merged into the darkness.

  To say I was totally thrown by her behaviour was an understatement. I fought the urge to follow her inside, turned around, a
nd slowly made my way towards our old home.

  The commercial area soon gave way to residential building. Here, I saw more evidence of lack of vegetation. Whole gardens were stripped of grass and flowers, leaving nothing but bare earth. I’d never seen anything like it before. Everywhere else, nature had softened every edge with all manner of plant life. The green dominated—except here, it would seem.

  The puzzle almost made me forget my sister’s strange behaviour. Almost, but not quite. Still, with greys still abundant in town, it made my journey home remarkably easy.

  The sight of my childhood hood made me go weak at the knees, vividly remembering how we left the place after taking care of what was left of the bodies that stained the floors and carpets. We couldn’t leave them like that.

  I stopped in front of the faded white wooden gate, but the disbelief that I was actually back home vanished when I saw the state of our front garden. Eleven months previously we had closed this gate and looked back at four rectangular mounds of brown earth, looking like parallel dominoes on a pool table. Now the garden resembled a World War 1 trench crossed with a muddy ploughed field.

  Dried mud decorated the path and the front of the house. I pushed open the gate, my mind trying to process this sight. Someone or something had dug up the bodies that we buried. I knew they couldn’t have climbed out themselves. We made doubly sure that none of them was going to claw their way out of their resting places.

  It took a fair amount of navigation to traverse from the gate up to the front of the house. Due to the total lack of vegetation, I found it impossible to even guess what this had happened. This desecration could have occurred last year, it could have happened over a decade ago; there was no way of knowing.

  I noticed the first bone embedded in the hard mud about a metre from the front door. As I neared, other bones showed themselves. I bent over, plucked the nearest one out of the mud, and ran my fingers along the surface. The deep scratches suggested that it been gnawed. Whether it was by whatever had dug it up or from other scavengers was impossible to say.

  This event worried me, not just because I could be holding part of one of my parents, but because they and our neighbours were already infected, and as far as I knew, not one creature was capable of eating tainted meat.

  Bodies of the infected had always lain where they fell, blighting the landscape, their changed meat resisting all attempts to rot down. I dropped the bone and slowly turned around, feeling very scared. I felt as though I was witness to an occurrence almost as powerful as the first outbreak. This town had been sterilised, and the word strip-mining ran through my mind. Every piece of flesh, either living or infected, had just ceased to exist.

  Not just the flesh either. Whatever had done this must have been responsible for the lack of plant life as well. The only thing moving was me, and right now that fact made me feel very conspicuous. I wanted to turn tail and run back into town, find my sister, and get the fuck out of here, and yet, instead, I turned back to the house, hurried over to the side door, and let myself inside.

  Slamming it shut was the easy part, but by now the unknown terror of what befell this town had already taken residence in my guts, and the only way that I could think of easing it, apart from getting out of here, was by thoroughly checking every room in the house.

  Whilst climbing the stairs, I found the terror easing slightly. Although Danielle wouldn’t tell me her reasons as to why she felt the desire to return home, I had confidence that she must have some vague idea of what had happened here. It pissed me off a lot that she refused to share; I had enough confidence in her judgment to believe that she wouldn’t knowingly lead us into danger. After all, she was only human, and though Danielle might be the most resilient person I had ever known, it didn’t make her invulnerable.

  Just like the lower floor, the next two levels gave me no surprises, they were just as we left them. The only footsteps showing on the dust-filled floorboards were mine. Nobody had been in this building while we had gone.

  I gazed out of my parent’s bedroom window, the elevation gave me a better opportunity to witness the change. A thousand shades of grey coloured the town and surrounding districts, and yet despite being a suburb of London, the rest of the city merged into the greenery.

  Strange to think that when I first clapped eyes on the ruined sweetshop that I actually welcomed the return of my emotions. Now I’d do anything to return to that state of mental non-living when the inside of my mind resembled this very fucking town.

  I turned from this blighted picture and sat down on the edge of my parent’s bed, averting my eyes when they ended up looking at a faded stain on the wallpaper. I moaned softly; that area was where dad killed mum, and yet even the organic residue on the wallpaper had gone.

  “Fuck this. I can’t stay here any longer,” I muttered, standing up and running over to the open door. As I stumbled out into the hallway, my left foot kicked a small object across the mouldy carpet. I fought down gales of hysterical laughter as a mobile phone clattered down the steps. I remembered just how easy it had been for our parents to get in touch with Danielle back then.

  I purposely stamped on the bloody thing as I passed it. There was no way that I was prepared to spend another minute in this house. If Danielle wasn’t prepared to share her explanations, then I wasn’t prepared to wait for her to return. Fuck it, I was out of here.

  The dust on the bottom step would serve as my post it note. I jumped over it, turned around, and wrote the name of the next town into the accumulated dust, followed by my name so she’d know who’d written it. I wiped my finger down my trousers and stepped out into the sunlight, feeling like I done the right thing. She would understand, but even if she didn’t, I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it. After all, this whole thing was her fault in the first place.

  Blakely wasn’t like this place, and the next town, like the rest of London, was buried beneath eleven years of uncontrolled plant growth. Once I got there I’d set a fire going, it would serve as a beacon for my sister. I wasn’t bothered about anyone else seeing it, after all, I was a hunter; what did I have to fear from anything?

  The irony of my last thought didn’t even raise a single smile. I took a deep breath, frowning as I realised that even the air tasted dead. “Stop that, you blathering idiot,” I retorted. It was highly likely that whatever happened here occurred a long time ago, and the chances of discovering the reason as to why was effectively zero. I should put it down to yet another unexplainable event and move on.

  I hurried past a local graveyard, averting my eyes at the sight of the overturned earth and broken open coffins. The desire to get the fuck out of here grabbed me and refused to let go. My hurrying turned into a jog that ended up as a sprint. Before our old house passed from sight, I glanced behind me one last time just to ensure that my sister wasn’t behind me. No such luck, all I saw was more of the same fucking grey.

  This place, the weirdness, this sterilised feel, and especially the stillness, was beginning to freak me out. We had expected the town to be relatively clear of the dead, but nothing could have prepared me for this.

  Neither of us was in any mood to engage in a pitched battle with the hordes of shambling dead that inhabited the towns, yet it appeared that the balance was changing over.

  Before her sudden decision to move, we had been slumming it inside a pub for the past couple of months. For the first time in years, we had actually discovered a place untouched since the outbreak. So untouched, we even found the original occupants lurking in one of the rooms on the second floor.

  The dead things soon started to move when their senses detected a hunter had broken through one of the barricaded windows. Apart from my little encounter with those two, neither of us had seen of any dead things since before the last winter. All that changed in just one week.

  Exactly eight days ago we caught sight of the first procession of shambling corpses. I was in the bedroom idly staring out of the window whilst chewing on a piece of jerky
that Danielle had found on her last trip. I noticed movement on the horizon and immediately believed that they were horses. Of all the livestock able to flourish through this disaster, the horses had come out top. I hadn’t seen a cow or a pig in over a decade.

  Their true appearance only became known once they got a little closer. I almost choked on my food when I saw how many they were. Danielle’s cry of alarm told me that she had seen them as well. My sister ran into the room and stood behind me, her hands on my shoulders. She was shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t blame her, there must have been thousands of them out there, all lurching and stumbling towards some unknown destination. Thankfully, that didn’t include our refuge.

  I slowly stood up and closed the window, unable to keep my eyes off this unprecedented spectacle. This line went on throughout the night. In the morning, apart from the choking stench and lumps of meat that had fallen from their moving bodies, there was no sight of any other zombie.

  It was my sister who suggested that our town might be clear, and that it was obvious that the food had run out, hence the mass exodus. I couldn’t fault her logic, but I still insisted on waiting for another few more days before we ventured out of our secure home.

  My first sight of green was just yards from me. I slowed to a jog and breathed a sigh of relief as my feet passed over some invisible barrier. With grass and weed under me now, that feeling of extreme unease finally began to lift. Looking back, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone along with her plan and stayed inside the pub where it was safe.

  Then again, maybe not. I ground the heel of my shoe into the soft earth, feeling thoroughly ashamed of my behaviour. Deep down I knew what the fuck was wrong with me. Of course, I did, I wasn’t a complete idiot. I had been starving myself of meat ever since I wavered onto the dark side. The food that Danielle had found for me kept my human body going, but that was about all it did.