After the Fall (Book 5): Stadium of the Damned

by Stephen Cross

  “If they haven’t got anything more, then they should let us go,” said Sarah. Her blood was rising. She allowed herself a few deep breaths, and repeated an often used boardroom mantra in her head,Never lose your cool, it immediately invalidates your position.

  “Maybe they’re keeping us here for our own good. You know, sometimes other people know better,” said Kathy. “Just because you were some hotshot executive doesn’t mean you know anything about the end of the world!”

  “Oh, so this is what this is about,” said Sarah, her cool quickly heating up. “Well maybe it takes someone to find out what’s going on instead of sitting here waiting to die!”

  “And I guess that would be you then, always making the decisions, always in charge. Well I guess it must be driving you crazy, with the soldiers being the actual ones in charge!”

  Abdul held up his hands. “Look, come on people, let’s try and calm down. This arguing isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  Kathy shot a glare at Abdul, he flinched. “Oh, stop being so fucking reasonable,” spat Kathy.

  “Watch your language mum,” said Max.

  “Oh…” Kathy faltered and let out a large humph sound.

  They ate the rest of their meal in silence.

  Sarah woke and gasped for breath. She tried to move but couldn’t. A hand was across her mouth and a face was leaning over her. She recognised it.

  Sergeant Crowe.

  “Shhh, it’s me,” he said putting a finger to his lips. He glanced around in the darkness, checking that the rest of her group were asleep.

  He stood up and beckoned for her to follow. She thought about waking Abdul, but something about the look on Crowe’s face changed her mind. He seemed nervous, as if he didn’t want to be seen.

  She got up quietly and followed Crowe down the terraces to the pitch. A few fires crackled in the dark, the smell of smoke wafting gently through the stadium. Most fires were burning down by now, it must have been around three or four in the morning. Sarah felt sluggish, cold, and much older than her forty years.

  Crowe led her along the side of the pitch, keeping in the shadows. He constantly scanned the terraces, especially the far corner where Alex and his group would be sleeping. Eventually they reached the barricade where she had nearly been mown down by a machine gun the previous day.

  She stopped as Crowe approached the barricade, the door opening silently as he did so. He entered, motioning for Sarah to follow.

  Sarah looked at the machine gun, silent and still in the dark, its one deadly eye watching her every move.

  “It’s ok,” said Crowe, “come on.”

  She walked quickly, jumping over the deep scar in the concrete the machine gun had left when nearly tearing her feet off. She stepped through the barricade into the tunnel.

  The door closed behind her, a solider quickly sealing them in. Crowe stood in the middle of the tunnel. Four soldiers were watching the barricade, one of them manning the heavy machine gun. Powerful lights on poles illuminated the corridor in hard geometric patterns of clinical brightness contrasting against impenetrable darkness.

  She stared at the soldier manning the machine gun.

  “It wasn’t him, it was me,” said Crowe, his voice a hollow echo in the hard concrete tunnel.

  “It was you that tried to shoot me?”

  “I wasn’t trying to shoot you, I was trying to save you.”

  “Shooting me is a novel approach to keeping me alive. Save me from what exactly? Was I in danger?”

  “Possibly,” said Crowe. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  He walked down the tunnel, without waiting to see if she would follow. Sarah looked behind her to the closed barricade door. The soldiers watched her silently.

  She followed Crowe, double stepping to catch up.

  They took a right into a large corridor, again lit with powerful halogens. Doors lined the sides of the wall. One said “Away Team Changing Room”.

  “Nice lights. I guess you have heating and a hot tub set up somewhere?” said Sarah.

  “We’ve always had the generator up and running,” said Crowe, his voice flat, his face emotionless, giving nothing away behind his large beard. “Gives us what we need to run this place. As long as we have the petrol.”

  “That’s good. For you. What about us out there? It’s getting cold you know. Soon it will be bloody freezing, and people will be dying.”

  “I know,” said Crowe. “But we have little enough petrol as it is. It wouldn’t stretch to keeping everyone warm.”

  “So you just keep yourselves toasty? Why not let us go and you lot can sit here whacking each other off for as long as you like?”

  Crowe allowed himself a thin smile. “Come on, up this way.”

  She followed him up four flights of stairs, and then turned into another corridor. This one was dark, unlit, again with doors lining the corridor. One of the doors was open, dim light leaking from inside. Sarah glanced in as they passed; looked like a bunk room, with several figures sleeping on camp beds. A pair of eyes from behind a book, illuminated with a dim torch, stared at her as she walked passed.

  “You going to tell me why you tried to shoot me?”

  “Yes,” said Crowe, “but you need to see something first.”

  They passed through a door into a dark wide corridor where their footsteps no longer echoed. Sarah felt her feet sink into soft thick carpet. Framed pictures of footballers and old men in tracksuits lined the walls. Ahead, sharp beams of moonlight cut the corridor into alternating cobalt blue and pitch black squares.

  Windows.

  They stopped when they reached the first one.

  “Ok,” said Crowe. “I’ve brought you to see this so you’ll understand.”

  “So show me,” said Sarah. She didn’t know why, but her heart was beating fast. She was nervous.

  Crowe stood to the side. “Look out the window.”

  Sarah walked around him cautiously, like a stray dog, to the window.

  A clear night, dark metal blue with a beautiful and full moon. Stars glistened like a million fairy’s eyes. She had never realised how many stars there were until the Fall. Once the city lights had died, the true primeval beauty of the night sky had been revealed.

  In the distance, the silhouettes of hills.

  “What am I looking at?” she said.

  “Below. Look down.”

  Sarah looked down. She gasped, and pulled her hand to her mouth. She thought she let out a small scream, and she was sure her heart stopped for a number of seconds. When she let out her breath it came with a sob.

  The ground below moved and undulated like a bed of seaweed. Dark shapes floated and squeezed together like microscopic bacteria on a petri dish. If she squinted her eyes, she could have been looking at the sea, and not thousands of bodies moving up and down, left to right as one.

  “Zombies…” she whispered.

  Crowe stood beside her. “It’s like this the whole way round the stadium. Thousands of them, and more come every day. They attract each other.”

  “You mean we’re… but what about.. can’t you shoot them?”

  Crowe shook his head, but didn’t laugh at her question, which she thought he should as it was a stupid question. “We don’t have the ammo.”

  Sarah put her hands up against the glass. A hundred thousand walking graves, waiting for flesh, her flesh. They would rip her apart, skin from muscle, tendon from bone. Pull out her innards, chew on her heart.

  She let out a small murmur. “What can we do?”

  “We don’t know. Not really. You see now why I had to do what I did? We need to keep everyone scared, terrified of what might happen if they try to get past us. Someone gets through the barricade, and they open the doors to outside without knowing what’s beyond, and we’re all finished. Every one of us undead by lunch time. Your little outburst, it had to be quelled, you understand now?”

  Sarah nodded. She did understand. Very much.


  “You’re right though,” continued Crowe. “We’re running out of supplies, fast. We estimate another two weeks of food. We have no more blankets. In a month or so, people are going to be dying en masse, either the cold or starving to death. Although, I think you’ll have to contend with Alex killing you all for food first. Maybe a better way to go, than starving. I don’t know.”

  Sarah stared at Crowe. “How can you say that?”

  Crowe stood straight before her. “You’ve never asked why I’m in charge here, just a young sergeant. I’ll tell you why. A month in, our lieutenant shot himself in the face. He took his revolver, put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger, blam. His brains all over the wall. He was only twenty nine, the same age as me. But he couldn’t take it. He cared too much.”

  Crowe turned to look out the window. “I have to be pragmatic, Sarah. About everything. I can’t afford to let feelings, emotions, anything grey, anything that isn’t yes or no, black or white, infect my thoughts. If I do, I’ll go crazy, just like the lieutenant. I have to tell everything exactly as it is, to myself, and to others. To care, I have to not care.”

  He rested his hand on Sarah’s shoulder and looked at her.

  “I think you’re the same?”

  His hand felt comfortable on her. The weight was good. Strong.

  “No. I do care,” she said.

  “That’s a shame, because it’s going to get you killed one day,” said Crowe.

  Chapter 4

  Sarah and Crowe stood in a large garage, its concrete walls cast with hard shadows from the one spotlight in the corner of the room. Several vehicles filled the otherwise sparse nothing of the room. Military vehicles. Three jeeps and four large trucks with their large flatbeds covered in camo green tarpaulin. Personnel carriers.

  A large metal retractable shutter covered a space large enough to let the vehicles in and out. It rattled gently with a steady clang. The sound of moaning carried from outside. Sarah shuddered to think of the thousands of dead on the other side, bumping mindlessly against the thin shutter.

  “There used to be eight personnel carriers,” said Crowe. His voice was a welcome break to the macabre background noise. “We tried to just ram it, you know, barge our way through the zombies, about a month ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “You probably didn’t see, because you weren’t looking for it. But the truck is still out there, about fifty feet from the door. It couldn’t get any speed up, the dead overran them. Lost six men.”

  Sarah studied Crowe’s eyes and she thought she saw a glimpse of emotion, a crack behind his veneer.

  “I’m sorry,” she said

  “Don’t be. I’m not. They volunteered.” He turned to face her. “We have to try again. Or we’re all going to be dead anyway.”

  The vehicles all had a light cover of dust of them. It seemed hard to believe that one couldn’t simply get in and drive away. Sarah had been used to going where she wanted, when she wanted. Life had been an open book. Pick and choose your page.

  Not anymore.

  “Why did you bring me here?” she said.

  “Over here.” Behind the trucks, up against the far wall stood four barrels. They glinted in the darkness, reflecting the few beams of light that penetrated this far beyond the trucks. “We have this much petrol left. Once this goes, the power goes. The refrigeration system dies and any food we have goes. Everything goes. And that’s your wood pile.” He motioned to a small pile of wooden blocks stacked up next to the barrels. It was alarmingly small.

  Crowe turned to face her. He almost disappeared in the darkness, his beard covering most of his face, dirt covering the rest. “You think this place is bad now, wait until there’s no fire out there. I think we’ll just have to open the doors and hope for the best.”

  Sarah felt a chill hand grab her heart. She realised she had grown used to life in the stadium over the past few months, as mean and cold and hard as it was. Humans really could get used to anything. Now the thought of even that meagre existence being taken away, terrified her.

  “It will be a massacre,” she said.

  “That’s why we got one last throw of the dice. Everything on black.” He walked over and patted one of the barrels. “We get everyone in the back of those trucks, except one. That last one, we load up with the barrels. Strip the tarpaulin off. Set it alight and set it out into the hoard out there. They’re so packed together they should all go up like Guy Fawkes. Hopefully we’ll have a dead head bonfire you can see for miles. Should be easier to push through if they’re charcoal.”

  “The fire won’t kill all of them,” said Sarah. She remembered back to when she had escaped from the tunnel. She had set a field alight trying to escape, but they had kept coming.

  “No, a few will probably go out before their brains are fried, but a lot of them’ll die. And the rest will hopefully be burnt up like barbecue chicken wings. We’ll have a hell of a better chance than we did before.”

  Sarah stared at the driver’s cab of one of the trucks. “Who’s going to dive the truck with the fire?” she said.

  Crowe smiled. “That’s the only flaw. We’re going to need a volunteer.”

  “We taking everyone?”

  “You mean, are we taking Alex and his lot?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “You’re not as hard as you make out, are you? You really want to save everyone here.”

  “It’s nothing personal,” said Crowe. “Just my last mission orders. I like to think I’m a good soldier.” He walked past her towards the door. His boots echoed heavily in the hollow concrete garage. “Come on, it’ll be light soon. I don’t want people to see you coming and going. They might think we’re doing each other.”

  Sarah settled back into her sleeping bag and pulled up her rug. Everyone was asleep. Or so she thought.

  “Pssst,” said a familiar voice. Abdul. “Where have you been?”

  Sarah looked over at Kathy, Mark and Max. Asleep. She shuffled closer to Abdul. “I’ve been with Crowe.”

  “In the stadium?” Abdul’s eyes were wide with surprise.

  “He’s got a plan to get us out of here.”

  “They’re going to get us out?”

  Sarah gave Abdul a quick summary of her hour with Crowe. The surrounding zombies, the trucks, the supply situation.

  “Oh my,” Abdul said simply and lay back down. “Sometimes it’s better not to know these things.”

  He was right, thought Sarah.

  Unseen by Sarah, Kathy opened her eyes, looked at her and Abdul for a moment, then closed them tight again.

  Chapter 5

  Crowe sat in the windowless security room. More than twenty monitors were mounted on the wall, each focusing on a different area of the stadium, both inside and out. A large screen in the centre of the bank of monitors showed the selected camera in detail. Crowe used the control panel in front of him to choose the camera, to pan, to zoom in and out, to alter the contrast and brightness; a myriad of tools to pry into every corner. The only thing he couldn’t do was listen.

  A young private, Pressman, stocky and dark featured, sat in the chair beside him.

  Crowe selected the camera focused on Alex and his group, and they appeared on the large screen in full colour and high resolution. Twenty two of them. They had gained an extra member during the past week.

  “You know,” said Pressman in his Lancastrian drawl. “You could just shoot them.”

  Crowe allowed himself a small smile. He moved the camera to the area of the group’s supplies. He zoomed in.

  “I could,” said Crowe, “but, hearts and minds, and all that. We can’t just go round exterminating people. They already think we’re the devil out there. They think we’ve got ‘em trapped.”

  “Then tell everyone about the zeds.”

  “No. That’d be panic. This is the right plan. Get everything in order, then get them the fuck out before they know what’s happening.
”

  “And Alex? You think he’s going to play ball?”

  Crowe zoomed the camera out and returned to the main group. Alex was standing by a barrel fire, warming his hands. He was a big man, a wide smile emerging often from behind his beard. He looked Scandinavian, thought Crowe, like a Nordic fisherman with his wide shoulders and blond hair, which had somehow managed to keep its blondness in spite of the dirt and sickness that surrounded them daily. Crowe wondered if that was part of his mystic. He looked clean, he looked strong.

  Crowe couldn’t blame people for turning to strength in times like these.

  He just had to make sure he was the strongest.

  “How do you think he picks his members?” said Crowe.

  Pressman shrugged. “Hardest, maybe? Or people he thinks could be a threat?”

  “True. I wonder why he hasn’t tried to recruit Sarah though. She’s strong.”

  “Also clever. Maybe too clever for Alex.”

  Crowe turned the camera again to the supplies. “You see any weapons there, anything we should be worried about?”

  The two men studied the pile of rugs, wood, and tins of food for a few minutes. Crowe zoomed in on a few club shaped pieces of wood, stuck with nails.

  “They haven’t been using all the wood for fire then,” said Pressman.

  “Look, there.” He panned the camera to a corner where a few jerry cans sat. “They’ve been stocking the petrol too.”

  “Interesting,” said Pressman.

  “You notice how they’re the only group with weapons? Any others get any, and he soon takes care of it.”

  “Makes sense. That way he’s got all the power.”

  “Apart from us.”

  “Apart from us,” agreed Pressman. “Again, you don’t think we should just take them out?”

  Crowe smiled. “As I said hearts and minds. We just got to make sure we have the right reason.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “I do. It’s already in action.” Crowe turned off the cameras. No point wasting power. He’d seen all he needed too.