by Sean Deville
The glass now gone, Kirk felt compelled to move back to see what else might befall man’s structures, and he was witness to every door being ripped from its hinges. No, ripped wasn’t perhaps the right word. Peeled, the doors were peeled from their frames, wood splintering, PVC snapping, and instead of them flying off into the undead masses, the doors hovered, suspended in the air for several seconds. They then dropped, the noise reverberating throughout the street like a dinner gong. For several seconds, the undead stood there, waiting, only for the one in the middle to raise up her remaining arm and scream with a voice that almost made Kirk vomit with terror. The undead could speak?
“FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!”
With that, the zombies moved with a speed Kirk had never thought possible, and in their hundreds, they disappeared through every open door and window on the street below. Within moments, the screams began. He knew he wasn’t safe here, and picking up his rucksack and the shotgun which he had discarded on entering the apartment, panic took him yet again. Where the fuck was he going to go?
17.13PM, 18th September 2015, Somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean
The Virginia class nuclear submarine was doing ten knots at radio depth when it got the emergency alert. Nobody on board was happy about what they were being asked to do. They had been at sea for two weeks, and there wasn’t a man on board who didn’t understand what this meant.
“Code red receiving flash traffic.”
“Officer of the deck here con, aye.”
“Code red flash message reads exercise emergency action message; recommend alert one.”
“Radio con, aye. Alert one, alert one. This is not a drill.” The captain, in his cabin for a precious brief moment to himself, heard the broadcast over the tannoy. He took off his reading glasses, a chill filling his bones, and he placed the book he was reading carefully to the side of him. Standing off his bunk, he looked at himself once in the mirror, adjusting his hair slightly and made his way instantly to the bridge. What the fuck was this now?
“Captain on deck.”
“Officer of the deck, confirm code red flash,” the captain ordered.
“Code red flash confirmed.”
“Officer of the deck, proceed to launch depth and prepare to hover.”
“Prepare to launch depth and prepare to hover, aye, sir. Dive proceed to launch depth and prepare to hover.” The hair on the back of the captain’s neck was on end; it always was in such situations. But those had always been drills. This was the first time this had happened for real. This was for real, right?
“Message ready for format and verification,” said the first officer.
“Control executive officer, this message requires battle stations missile. Man battle stations missile.”
“Chief of the watch, sound the general alarm.” A loud claxon rang out throughout the submarine. They all knew this day might one day come, but none of them actually believed they would be there when it happened. That was the whole point of the nuclear deterrent right, to stop this sort of thing.
“Main battle stations missile.” The captain left the deck to the briefing room where his three senior officers awaited him.
“Captain, the EMT has a properly formatted message. Request permission to authenticate.” The Executive Officer, Mr. Jones, stood before him in the cramped briefing room with three other people. Everyone had a tint of nervousness in their eyes. They had practiced this numerous times, but this may well be the real thing.
“Mr. Peerce, do you concur?”
“Yes, Captain, I concur.”
“Mr. Clinton, do you concur?”
“Yes, Captain, I concur.”
“You have permission to authenticate.”
“Authenticate, aye sir.” The EO broke open the codes that he had taken from the captain’s safe and compared them to the codes on the message he held. “Captain, the message authenticates.”
“I agree, sir, the message authenticates,” said Mr. Peerce.
“Captain, I concur,” said Mr. Clinton.
“I concur it is an authentic message,” the captain agreed. His stomach felt heavy. He felt sick.
“Captain, authenticated mission requires a change of primary target.”
“Mr. Peerce, do you concur?”
“Yes, Captain, I concur.”
“Mr. Clinton, do you concur?”
“Yes, Captain, I concur.”
“I concur authenticated mission requires a change of primary target. Executive Officer, break out the CIP key.”
“Break out the CIP key, aye, sir.” The captain looked at the coordinates in the message. My God. He did his best to hide his astonishment. This couldn’t be right.
“Mr. Peerce, get on the horn. I want this message confirmed.”
“Sir, that is not SOP.”
“I know that, damn it, but if I’m going to nuke a city of ten million people, I need to be sure.”
The captain had moved back to the bridge with his executive officer.
“Captain on deck.”
“Attention on deck, all stop.”
“All stop, aye, sir.”
“Helm, all stop.”
“Answers all stop, sir.”
“Very well, helm. Mr. Jones, do we have contact with command?”
“Aye, sir, putting you through now.” The conversation was brief, several of the junior sailors giving the man they looked up to nervous looks. The captain’s face was neutral the whole time; he was like a duck on the lake. Calm on the surface, absolute fucking turmoil underneath. He put down the headset that his radio man had given him. He picked up the ships tannoy mike. Could he do this? Could he really order the launch?
“Commence hovering,” the captain said
“Hovering, aye, sir.”
“Set condition 1SQ, this is the captain. This is not an exercise. I repeat, this is not an exercise.”
“Second verification, this is the executive officer. This is not an exercise,” Mr. Jones said into his handset.
“Second condition 1SQ, this is not an exercise.” Over the loudspeaker came other voices from the firing control in a different part of the boat. There was a palpable nervous tension throughout the submarine. In the engine room, one of the younger sailors threw up.
“Set condition 1SQ.”
“Standby fire order.”
“The fire order will be 1.”
“Fire order verified, sir.”
“I have the firing key,” said the captain as he was handed the key on the chain, which he placed around his neck. The same sailor gave his second in command an identical key. The captain ran his palms on his trousers, wiping off the nervous sweat that was present there.
“I have the firing key,” said the executive officer.
“Weapons con, the message has been validated.” His voice broke ever so slightly, and he looked to his executive officer who nodded reassuringly. He was really going to do this. “Weapons con, you have permission to fire.”
The sea was relatively calm, and the tanker ship outbound from the Middle East and heading for the Gulf of Mexico was making good time. Sat on the bridge, his feet up, the captain was enjoying his third cup of coffee of the day. He liked it sweet, despite what his dentist told him.
“You really should cut back on the sugar; you get too much tooth decay. What happens if you get tooth decay on one of your long voyages?” The captain had nodded his compliance, safe in the knowledge that the dentist’s advice would be put to one side and completely ignored. To compound the matter, he dipped a biscuit into the coffee, a strange practice he had developed as a child.
It was the first mate, stood at the side of the ship, cigarette in hand who saw the missile first. Off on the horizon, the long trail of smoke shot into the sky as the missile erupted from the water’s surface. It quickly sped upwards into the clouds above. The cigarette dropped from his mouth, and he ran to the bridge to see why World War III had just started, bursting in on the captain, making him jump and spill coffee a
ll down himself.
“Merde,” screamed the captain as the hot liquid scolded him. Out at sea, four other submarines were also each firing a single missile. Command had decided that, due to the fact the crews were being asked to fire on a friendly target and the very real threat that humans sometimes didn’t do what they were told no matter the training, they couldn’t rely on one sub crew. They needn’t have worried. All five submarines fired their nuclear payload as ordered, those on board conscious of the reality they were now a part of. Those missiles would kill hundreds of thousands of people, people whose only crime was to wake up in a world gone insane.
17.31PM, 18th September 2015, Hounslow, London
Rachel sensed it the way animals sense natural disasters, and she needed to see. She didn’t know why she felt what she felt, but she climbed the fire escape stairs anyway, Rasheed close at hand as he now always was. He found the stairs more difficult to handle, the hours of decay making him progressively more uncoordinated as his body broke down as nature had intended. Only nature hadn’t intended that he carry on walking about after his heart had stopped beating. The stairs took them to the top of a building with a flat roof, the perfect vantage point for what she needed. Something in her told her which way was east, and she shambled over to the low wall and waited. She saw it before she heard it, the blast bright off in the distance, the light burning an image onto her dying eyes, far enough away that no lasting damage was done. Rachel cared not, she looked anyway. Was she far enough away? Were her children safe or was this the end of her?
For the people still alive in the centre of London, the blast ended their lives in a heartbeat, and in hindsight, it was perhaps a mercy. Exploding in the air above the city, everything within a half-mile radius was obliterated. The warhead exploded, superheating the surrounding air and creating a rapidly expanding fireball that was completely unstoppable and like nothing that nature had ever intended be unleashed upon the planet. Hitting with appalling accuracy, the nuclear blast obliterated the former seat of the British government, the once iconic Houses of Parliament being turned into atomic dust. At the centre of the fireball, temperatures became nearly four times that found at the centre of the sun, producing a blast wave that ripped through the surrounding city for miles around.
Nearly a mile from the centre of the blast, the road outside the Imperial War Museum melted within half a second of detonation. A second later, the building itself was ripped apart by the explosive wave and 750 miles per hour winds, melting everything that would melt and burning everything that would burn. One mile out from the centre, the fireball created shone nearly 5000 times brighter than the Sahara sun at noon. All trees and vegetation simply combusted into flames and the very ground itself erupted into superheated dust. The marble on the Wellington Monument vaporised. Four seconds later, the blast wave completely destroyed the monument and all the surrounding buildings
Within five miles of the blast, anything within a direct line of sight of the fireball either burst into flames if it was flammable, or gave up its solid state. Despite the danger of the infected, some people were caught outside, and the areas of their skin not covered became instantly scorched with third-degree burns. Any creature unfortunate enough to look at the fireball was instantly blinded as the retinas were simply burnt out. Most of the infected that remained alive in the centre of London were thus rendered blind and aflame. As hardy as they were, many of them perished due to flying debris and the effects of the blast wave, only to emerge from the rubble as another species. Very few humans survived, and those that did wished they hadn’t.
The huge fire created by the nuke’s detonation rapidly increased in intensity, generating ground winds of hurricane force and boiling temperatures that would cook anyone caught in them. London, one of the greatest cities of the world, and arguably the birthplace of Western democracy, was reduced to nothing but a burning crater. It became the first Necropolis of many.
Rachel felt the warmth as the winds hit her. Although most of her skins receptors were dead, there were enough to register that she was safe from the explosion. In the distance, the mushroom cloud had already begun to form, spewing radioactive debris into the atmosphere. Something within her told her that the radiation was no threat to the undead, that in fact, it would only increase their numbers as the infected died from its ravaging contamination. The bodies of the dead were already breaking down, what was a little radiation going to do that wasn’t already happening? She held no feeling for what the mushroom cloud meant, only that it was confirmation that she was right to send her legions far and wide. Now that the humans had fired their weapon, they were unlikely to fire it again, because as powerful as it was, it was a warhead that needed a target. And she had, through whatever power had given her such prophecy, sent her soldiers to the four winds.
It was time to gather her forces once more. It was time to gather her flock together and to go where her instincts told her she was needed. Rachel made her way back towards the ladder, her curiosity now fulfilled. Briefly, the movement of her head as she turned drew in the delicious odour of meat. And she paused to look around. There was a human up here. Perhaps now was a good a time as any for her to finally feed. Rachel turned and walked towards where she knew the human to be.
Kirk crouched behind the air conditioning unit, watching the two figures with more fear than he ever thought he was capable of experiencing. They were absolutely terrifying. He had pissed himself out of sheer mind-numbing horror. He could barely breath he was so sick with fear. What had once been a woman stood almost mesmerised by the distant devastation, her companion swaying and groaning behind her. The wind blew over him, and brought with it a host of smells, none of them pleasant. Fuck, how did they even get up here? He thought zombies were supposed to be mindless creatures, but these seemed to be anything but.
The creature with one arm turned and made its way back towards where it had gained access to the roof. He called it an it because it had long ago stopped being female. “Come on, come on,” he thought to himself. “Get off the fucking roof.” And right then it stopped, and moved its head the way Kirk had seen those down in the street moving theirs earlier. And hidden as he was, spying on them from a small gap between cabinets, it suddenly looked right at him.
“Fooood,” it seemed to say, its companion turning towards Kirk also.
“Fuck this,” Kirk cursed under his breath. The two began to amble towards him, the male one sporting a wicked head wound. Weren’t zombies supposed to be killed by shooting them in the head? Wasn’t that what every piece of zombie fiction said? Kirk gripped the shotgun tightly, and stepped out into the open. For a brief moment, he thought he saw both zombies smile. The male one started moving quicker, its disorganised advance almost comical. Kirk found his hand shaking as he raised the gun up to fire.
“Don’t come any closer,” he said with a voice almost close to despair. What the fuck was he warning them for, they were the dead. The male lifted up an arm as if reaching for him, and he felt his finger pressing down on the trigger. But he never fired. He never fired because the gun was ripped out of his hands by an invisible force and went sailing off over the edge of the roof. He yelled in pain because his finger, caught in the trigger guard, dislocated at the second joint. Kirk backed up to the edge of the roof, the backs of his thighs pressing up against the low wall that was the only thing stopping him from toppling over. Looking down at the street below briefly, he saw the damned in the hundreds massed down there.
This was it. He was dead. Kirk knew he’d been living on borrowed time, and the tears flooded his eyes. Not like this, he wasn’t supposed to go out like this. They were close now, a few more steps and they would be upon him, but he wouldn’t allow that. He would rather chuck himself to the ground below and hope that the fall killed him rather than let these two tear the flesh from his bones. In a final act of desperation, he turned and made to hurl himself off the roof. But all of a sudden, his limbs no longer seemed to work, and he felt a crushing
force encircle him, pulling him backwards away from the edge. He couldn’t breathe, and total panic now hit him. Whatever contained him, spun him round, and he found himself face to face with a creature no makeup artist in Hollywood could ever create.
Kirk felt like he was suspended, held by invisible chains, and Rachel caressed his cheek with her remaining soiled hand. The male moved around behind him, and he felt dead hands grasp his upper arms.
“So pretty,” Rachel said through slurred lips. She wiped tears from his face with a dirty and bloodied index finger and pushed the finger into her mouth. “So sweet.”
“Fuck off, leave me alone,” Kirk implored, thrashing uselessly.
“No. You mine,” said Rachel and she grabbed his left hand in a vice-like grasp and brought the fingertips to her teeth. “Slow, I eat you slow.” Then she bit down, and the pain ripped Kirk’s world asunder.
17.34PM, 18th September 2015, Caterham, South of London
“Fuck,” Owen said, looking at the mushroom cloud that had formed on the northern horizon.
“Now you see,” Fabrice said. “Now you see the truth of it. Do you see the evil that man has created in this world, and why the land needs to be purged of their wickedness?”
“Yeah yeah; no need to rub it in.” Owen hated the guy with every passing hour. He talked like a fucking preacher and spent most of his time judging Owen disapprovingly. But Owen put up with him because there were things he didn’t know that Fabrice knew. So he would keep him around, at least for a while until it was clear that he was no longer of any use. But boy was he going to make the cunt as uncomfortable as possible.
They hadn’t progressed as far as Fabrice would have liked, because Owen kept stopping to ‘Have Fun.’ Having fun usually meant tormenting some hapless soul they came across on their exodus south. The last incident had been a party of three who Owen’s infected had caught pillaging a corner shop. Fortunately for the three men, two of them had been armed, and Owen had felt compelled to dispatch them before they damaged himself or his precious infected. Fabrice saw instantly that Owen Patterson was the worst kind of bully, the type who enjoyed causing physical and mental anguish. Deep within what he knew from his travels through Owen’s mind, there was a history of neglect and abuse in the young man’s life. But that was irrelevant to what Owen was now. If it hadn’t been for the fact he was doing God’s work, Fabrice would have seriously considered labelling Owen as the personification of evil.