Ever vigilant, Nate had come looking like he was ready for some mass execution, all dolled up in his bad-ass tactical vest, spare clips for his handgun, shotgun shells aplenty, and the double barrel with the selective trigger loaded and ready for action.
We could hear voices, even though it was probably only seven in the morning, just a single, soothing voice, all hypnotic, though no words could be made out. We crested the rise, following the sound of the voice and as we reached the top, both of us stopped dead.
There, on the grass in front of this stunning country retreat, were ten people.
Doing yoga.
Yoga.
Fucking yoga in the apocalypse.
You only had to take one look at these people to know that Nate wasn’t going to get on with them. These people were gentle-looking, flighty and farty, breathing in the country air and finding their centre and learning to love themselves or some shit, while I was accompanied by the Terminator’s granddad.
The instructor was the only one facing us when we appeared, a quite beautiful woman in her mid-forties, who clearly took really good care of herself. One thing I immediately noticed was that everyone looked clean, and that gave me real hope for my future.
The instructor’s eyes were closed as she talked, holding some position that was sure to win any game of Twister without fail, but as she relaxed and began issuing her next instruction, she opened her eyes and Nate and I were both in her cone of vision.
She stopped for a moment, too stunned at seeing our incongruous little trio standing outside their shiny lodge. There was Nate; all in black, tactical vest, handgun, shotgun, and a facial expression that silently said, “what the actual fuck?” He’s shit at hiding what he thinks, especially when he thinks, “What the fuck?”
Then there was me, dirty and dishevelled with an off-centre ponytail in hair that hadn’t been washed in a month or more, my loose athletic pants, battered Nikes, vest top and hoody, with a backpack hanging over my torso, and a pug’s head staring back at them all, judging them. I waved and smiled, knowing full well Nate probably looked like he was about to execute every last motherfucking one of them.
The instructor let out a little squeal, squeaking out a name.
“Theo!”
A man at the front, about the same age as the yoga teacher—probably a little older actually—paused in his stretch and turned, blanching at the sight of us. To be honest, I nearly blanched at the sight of him. He had this really weird round face, with crumpled skin in folds, and a shock of wiry black hair on his head and sticking out of his chin, like he’d just been electrocuted. When I saw him, all I could think of was how he looked like a testicle. With teeth.
The whole group by now had turned to see the commotion and most of them squealed, clustering together fearfully, begging for their lives like Nate was about to start blasting.
“Whoah whoah!” I shouted, trying to get them to calm the fuck down. “Hey, we’re not here to hurt anyone!”
“This is private property!” declared Testicle... erm… Theo. He tried to muster as much gumption as he could, but honestly, he sounded on the verge of tears. “I’ll call the police!”
Both Nate and I stared at him for a moment, stared at each other for another moment, then turned our gaze back to him. As one, we both laughed.
“Okay, Theo, is it?” He nodded dumbly. “Okay, Theo, first question. Where’s your phone?”
As I thought, nobody who looks like this guy takes his phone to yoga. He looked like a kid just caught in a lie and his bottom lip quivered the same way.
“Secondly, we’re not here to hurt anyone. We heard your drumming and chanting last night and—as you can see—we’re a little worse for wear.” I gestured to my appearance which was clearly lacking my usual hotness. “And thirdly, call the police? Really? How long have you been here? Do you even fucking know what’s going on out there?” I gestured in a general sweep behind me.
“This is a spiritual retreat,” stammered Theo. “We’ve been here since the 20th of June. No electronics permitted.”
“Fuck Testi… Theo,” I corrected quickly. Shit, he really did look like a toothy bollock. “How fucking long is this retreat?”
“Thirty days.”
“A month?” I choked. “A fucking month? Who the hell can afford to fuck off for a month?”
I mean, come on. A month of doing yoga, chanting, meditating, inhaling incense and twatting drums round a campfire? Who the shitting hell can afford that?
“Are you telling us,” growled Nate. “Are you seriously telling us, that you haven’t been in contact with anyone outside this lodge, for the past month?”
“No one,” affirmed Theo. “The retreat finishes the day after tomorrow.”
Nate and I shared another amazed look, one of utter disbelief. While the world has been holding the side of the toilet bowl with two white-knuckled hands, screaming in horror as it shits out bloody spikes, this bunch of twats had been singing Kum Ba Yah, blissfully unaware of the world’s end.
Un-fucking-believable.
“Nate,” I said. “Put the gun down, you’re scaring the hippies.”
Nate snorted and lowered the shotgun.
“Now look,” I said. “We’re really not here to hurt anyone, so can we start again? My name’s Erin Locke, but everyone calls me Lockey. This here is Nate Carter, and this is Particles. I think you better put the kettle on. Tell me you have coffee?”
Theo shook his head. “Green teas, camomile, fruit teas; this is a place of healing and cleansing. Here we detox and reconnect with our inner self.”
Here we go, I thought. Here comes the twat-speak. I could feel Nate’s disgust rolling off him in near physical waves. These were not his people.
“Typical, you’re all on a detox, when I really need to tox the shit out of myself,” I moaned out loud. “Well, put some fucking asparagus and broccoli tea on, or whatever it is you drink here, and let’s talk. There’s some shit you need to know.”
THE LAST RESPONSE
“It’s bad, Dean,” said John. “Really fucking bad.”
Deputy Chief Constable John Walsh was not a man given to profanity or exaggeration, so the gravity of his words and tone were not lost on Dean. The two men had been friends for over twenty years, so Station Sergeant Dean Williams knew that when John Walsh said things were, “fucking bad,” then it was far more serious than the understated simplicity of those two words.
It was a little after 2pm and Dean felt like he had been awake forever. With gritty, dry eyes, hunger gnawing at his rapidly shortening temper, and every muscle fibre a dull ache, Dean was edging ever closer to physical and mental exhaustion. He had experienced some taxing nights over his long career, but nothing like the past fourteen hours.
Pulling the graveyard shift as a favour to a friend, things had apparently started to unravel with the passing of midnight. As the ranking officer in charge of dispatch for the evening at the Cheshire Constabulary headquarters, things soon started spiralling out of control, and he had rung his wife, Maria, to let her know he was staying on a while to help with the ever-growing disorder. The night’s turbulence had started small, just a higher than average number of calls, but they were all themed on violent crime; apparently random attacks had spiked unnaturally, primarily from local hospitals and infirmaries, regarding maniacs assaulting and biting staff or patients on an ever-increasing scale.
Events started ramping up from there. Strange calls started—and continued—to come into 999, as panicked callers screamed down the lines about the dead rising and attacking the living. With so many calls of a similar, bizarre nature, it was clear from the outset that something just wasn’t right.
Off duty officers were called in as an emergency response to deal with the growing mayhem, patrol cars were run ragged, all authorised firearms officers were told to gear up in response to the rising levels of violence, paramedics, firefighters and other first responders were being attacked at the scenes of accidents; it wa
s chaos on a scale unlike anything Dean had ever heard of, let alone experienced. Dispatch was a scene of frenzied bedlam, the operators unable to deal with every request, desperately trying to triage the most serious sounding incidents as the night turned to day, but the rising of the sun only accelerated the panic to new heights as most of the world woke up on what they thought to be a normal Wednesday, 23rd June, 2010.
Once the rush hour traffic started, as people went about their normal routines of work and school, things went exponential. Dean had authorised the constabulary’s brand new EC135 Eurocopter—acquired only a year earlier—to take off and give them an eye in the sky, and the images coming back to dispatch shocked everyone.
Plumes of black smoke dotted the aerial panorama, from building fires, to road traffic accidents, and even rioting and looting as panic started to take hold in the county’s larger towns. Cheshire Constabulary was responsible for over a million people in the north west of England, but they were ill equipped and criminally under resourced to deal with anything of the apparently apocalyptic scale of mayhem and widespread violence. The Conservative government had been ravaging the police force with cuts for years, but even at the height of their strength, this level of destruction and terror could never have been planned for. This was the disintegration of social order on a colossal scale in a spectacularly short amount of time.
Their county, with its vast stretches of countryside, and small towns and villages, was sleepy to many of their neighbouring shires, especially in direct comparison to the nearby metropolitan forces of Manchester and Merseyside. In the larger population centres of Chester and Warrington within Cheshire, the reports were—quite simply—apocalyptic, according to the phone conversation that Dean had just had with his old friend.
“We don’t know what this is, Dean,” said John. The line sounded unstable, as his voice flashed in and out of the conversation, though not seriously enough to make understanding difficult. “Honestly, we just don’t know, but what we do know, is that it’s everywhere.”
Dean blinked rapidly for a second before responding. “Everywhere, as in all over the county, or the country?”
“Everywhere, Dean. Africa, Asia, mainland Europe, the US. Everywhere.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he replied, still trying to process the staggering scale of what the Deputy Chief Constable was intimating.
“No, Dean, it doesn’t,” he agreed. “Everyone is locking down, all the luminaries being whisked away to safe locations, military response gearing up.” His tone lowered. “Dean, I know this goes against everything you believe in, but you need to walk away, get Maria, and get somewhere safe, but I need to ask something of you.”
Dean rubbed at his eyes. He’d already been awake for nearly twenty-four hours and his exhausted mind was struggling to process John’s barrage of horror.
“Walk away? What do you mean, walk away?”
“Dean, we’ve lost. The country is lost, it’s collapsing as we speak. I don’t know what’s going on, but listen to me, and listen very carefully.”
“Okay,” he answered warily.
“Dean, the dead are coming back to life. No, before you interrupt me, just listen, okay? Anyone dead is standing back up and killing any living person in their vicinity. A bite from one of the dead is a death sentence, so if anyone who comes near you has been bitten, you either get the hell away from them, or you kill them, and from the latest information I have, these dead things can only be put down for good by destroying the brain.”
“John,” snorted Dean. “Are you actually trying to tell me this is a zombie apocalypse?”
“Yes.”
The single word was so solid, so certain, that Dean’s attempt at casual humour died on his lips. John Walsh was not a man given to rumour, or overstatement. He was a man of solid facts, provided by reliable sources, before he even said a single word on a subject. He was rational, intelligent, logical, and stoic, with a dry sense of humour, but one without whimsy. His simple affirmation of Dean’s half-joking question almost stopped the sergeant’s heart in his chest.
“Dean,” said John, “you’re an experienced SFO, so I’m telling you now, you go to the locker, you load up with everything you can put your hands on, you get Maria, and you find somewhere safe, away from major population density.”
The “locker” was the slang term for the armoury, where the HQ’s array of firearms and operational equipment was stored.
“You’re shitting me?”
“No, Dean, I’m most definitely not.” He heard John suck in a hard breath before speaking again. “But I need to ask you a favour, and it’s a big one.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know if I can get out of Chester, Dean,” he said gravely, the phone connection wavering again for a heartbeat. “You think it’s bad over your way, but here, it’s beyond the pale. The road system for this city has never been big enough for the amount of traffic that passes through it, and reports are that it’s utter chaos out there. Every major route in and out is gridlocked, jammed in tight, from accidents that nobody is responding to, and panicked drivers only exacerbating the mess. The A55 and M56 are a mess, so even if I managed to find a way out through the chaos and violence in the city itself, I don’t know if I can get to you.”
Dean heard the catch in his voice, the smallest quiver as he swallowed a thick lump. That hint of rising emotion stopped the sergeant cold.
“What are you saying, John?”
“I’m saying I can’t get to Sarah, but I’m hoping you can.”
John’s daughter, Sarah, was seventeen and enrolled in Crenshaw private school, about eleven miles from Dean’s location. His wife, Andrea, had died four years earlier after a sudden and shocking brain aneurysm, taking all of them by horrified surprise.
Sarah utilised the school’s boarding facilities during term time, as around half the students did, because of John’s busy career, and the two had a strained relationship because of their extended absence from each other, but Dean and Maria had always been in the girl’s life. John had asked them to be godparents when she was born, and they took that role in Sarah’s life seriously. As far as Dean and Maria were concerned, Sarah was family.
“I don’t know if I’ll make it out,” continued John. The resignation Dean heard in his friend’s voice told him that John believed there was no chance, let alone a slim one. Things must be bad. Really bad. That realisation cut into Dean’s heart like a knife of ice.
“What if I send the EC135 to you, to come get you?”
“No, Dean,” replied John in a tone of iron. “Just send everyone home. Send them back to their families. I’m not risking anyone to come and get me out of this hellhole, plus where I am, there’s nowhere they can safely put down and if I try to move now, my chances are less than favourable.”
Always with the understatement, thought Dean. “Less than favourable,” to John Walsh was, “no fucking chance in this reality,” to anyone else.
“I’ll get Sarah, John,” said Dean finally, his heart like a lead weight in his chest. “I’ll go to Crenshaw, get Sarah, then Maria, and we’ll keep her safe. Like she was our own.”
“Bless you, Dean,” he said in a breathy exhale. The relief in John’s voice was palpable. There was a pause for a moment, and Dean heard John nervously licking at dry lips. “Tell her I love her,” he said finally. “And that I’m sorry.”
“Piss off,” said Dean. “I’ll tell her you love her, no doubt, but I’ll tell her you did everything you could to get back to her, that you’re still doing everything you can. Losing Andrea hurt you both, John, so don’t take this on... John?” The line had gone dead. “John?”
Dean looked at his phone. No service. He looked up at the chaos of the dispatch room from the window of his office, seeing the looks of confusion on everyone’s face as they hammered at switchboards, fingers pressed to headsets as though pushing at them would magically restore the sound from deadened lines. Picking up the phone o
n his desk, he put it to his ear.
Silence. Not even a tone.
“Shit,” he huffed, wiping the tears that had been welling with the cuff of his shirt.
He hoped Maria would be watching the news, or listening to the radio, and lock herself in. He uttered a word of thanks to whatever powers might be listening that today was her second day of leave, and she had not been at work. The hospitals were the first to start hammering the emergency lines for police support when the clock ticked past midnight. Had Maria been working last night, she would have been at ground zero for the start of this whirlwind of violence and havoc, as the medical centres seemed to be hit hard and early. If the dead were indeed rising, then it made perfect sense that hospitals were hit with the most ferocity.
He huffed, rubbing fingers at tired, scratchy eyes. The dead were rising; what kind of madness was this? He almost laughed at his thought; it made perfect sense that the hospitals were hit the hardest? Nothing about this whole debacle made any sense.
Dean stood from behind his desk and inhaled a long, deep breath to calm his frayed and exhausted nerves, then stepped into the open control area, put his fingers in his mouth, and unleashed a shrill whistle that cut across the clamour. Wide and wild eyes turned towards him, fear hanging like an angry cloud above the officers and clerks who were still here, still trying to do their job in the face of unprecedented anarchy.
“I’m proud of every one of you,” he said. “And thank you all for your hard work, diligence, and commitment so far today, but it’s time to go home and look after your own.”
“What’s going on, Sarge?” called one woman.
“Honestly, I don’t know, so I’ll tell you what I do know, and please try not to laugh, as I’m being deadly fucking serious.” He stared back at them in silence for a moment, allowing them to register the severity and gravitas of his demeanour. “The dead are rising to attack the living, only trauma to the brain will put them down, and anyone bitten by the dead will die, no exceptions. Go home, get your loved ones, get supplies, and try to find somewhere safe away from all the chaos.”
Lockey vs. the Apocalypse | Book 1 | No More Heroes [Adrian's Undead Diary Novel] Page 8