by Ryan Casey
Infection Z
Ryan Casey
Contents
Bonus Content
INFECTION Z
1. One
2. Two
3. Three
4. Four
5. Five
6. Six
7. Seven
8. Eight
9. Nine
10. Ten
11. Eleven
12. Twelve
13. Thirteen
14. Fourteen
15. Fifteen
16. Sixteen
17. Seventeen
18. Eighteen
19. Nineteen
20. Twenty
21. Twenty-One
22. Twenty-Two
23. Twenty-Three
24. Twenty-Four
25. Twenty-Five
26. Twenty-Six
27. Twenty-Seven
28. Twenty-Eight
29. Twenty-Nine
30. Thirty
31. Thirty-One
32. Thirty-Two
33. Thirty-Three
34. Thirty-Four
35. Thirty-Five
36. Thirty-Six
37. Thirty-Seven
38. Thirty-Eight
39. Thirty-Nine
40. Forty
41. Forty-One
42. Forty-Two
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About the Author
About This Book
Copyright
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INFECTION Z
One
Saturday morning was as lazy and beautiful as ever until Hayden McCall had to brain his landlord before breakfast.
He woke to the usual ringing sound of his phone alarm. It seemed louder than usual, buzzing around his skull like a thousand metal needles rattling in a glass jar. He kept his eyes sealed shut, desperate to keep the painful bright light seeping in through them, and he reached over for the alarm that he knew was somewhere on his bedside table beside him.
But on and on the ringing went, on and on and on.
Frigging alarm. Didn’t even need one in the first place, especially not on a weekend.
He rolled over in his bed, which reeked of booze and sweat. He’d been meaning to change his covers the night before … or maybe the night before that. Or the week before. Whatever. He lived alone in this upstairs flat, so it wasn’t like his mummy was around to check on him or nag on at him to tidy up.
Although, Hayden figured sometimes he probably needed a big of nagging.
He found his iPhone, which he’d paid for using his weekly jobseekers benefit allowance, and he smacked the screen with his tender thumb. The sound of the alarm rumbling from the phone subsided, and finally, Hayden was embraced in a wave of peace and calm.
He turned over. Kept his aching eyes closed. Covered them with his hands. Enjoyed the silence, but tried his best not to heave at the taste of booze lingering on his tongue.
As he lay there in the silence, a space beside him in his empty bed, Hayden wondered how the hell his life had reached this point. Twenty-five years old, jobless, “clinically depressed” according to his doctor, who he didn’t bother seeing anymore. It was the end of January 2015, but it seemed like it was only 2013, let alone 2014. Life since leaving university with a second-class honours in English with Creative Writing hadn’t worked out so well.
He’d planned on travelling. Planned on finding some graduate scheme to enrol in, securing him a cushy job for life.
But hell. The PS4 came out last year. That turned out to be far more fun than any job.
He rolled back onto his side and ignored the crippling headache the booze was giving him when he heard a large thump at the front door.
His eyes bolted open and Hayden instantly regretted that. Sunlight peeked in through his partly-opened metal blinds, filling his three by five metre bedroom with headache-inducing light. He felt the taste of the booze intensify in his mouth, the smell of his own sweat getting even stronger, even nastier.
And then he heard another knock at the door.
Another.
And then another.
He rolled over and squinted at his phone. Ten thirty a.m. Who would be here to visit him at ten thirty a.m. on a Saturday?
Shit—who would be here to visit him at all?
And then he remembered and his stomach sank to new, nausea-inducing depths.
His rent was overdue. Way, way overdue. He’d promised his landlord, Terry, an interest-loaded payment by today. And he’d got the money. He’d convinced Mum to let him borrow some. She was annoyed with him, and Dad moaned about Hayden’s lack of responsibility as usual, but eventually she’d caved and given in to his money demands, like all good mums did.
But then he’d seen a new PS4 game, Destiny, in the January sales.
And then he’d seen another game on sale and then another and another and …
Yeah. Games, booze and food add up to quite an expense.
And now his landlord was here to collect what Hayden owed him.
Hayden kept quiet and still as the landlord banged at the front door again. There was nothing else he could do. He definitely couldn’t show his face. But then the landlord had promised that if Hayden didn’t let him inside, he’d come in here himself and trash all of Hayden’s belongings.
So Hayden knew he didn’t have long. There was only so long he could stay here, the quilt covers pulled up to his face, pretending not to be here.
There was only so long he could pretend not to exist.
“Hay … Hayden. Hayden. Please. Let me in. Please.”
There was something strange about Terry’s words. They didn’t sound completely angry, which was unusual. They sounded … strained. Like Terry was in some kind of pain.
More banging at the front door. More rattling at the letterbox.
“Please,” Terry gasped. “Please … I … Just let me in.”
Hayden felt a wave of cold creep down his neck and send a shiver through his aching, hungover body. He’d been expecting an angry barrage of insults from Terry, but not the pained gasps that he heard.
In a way, the pained gasps were worse than anger because Hayden hadn’t been ready for them. He hadn’t been expecting them.
He didn’t know what to do.
And then he heard the guttural scream from outside his house.
There was something completely terrifying about this scream. It was high-pitched, but there was a clear raspiness to the voice, which suggested to Hayden that the screamer was a man. But men didn’t even scream like that on horror movies. The closest thing he could come to describing the scream was the noise Dad made when he found Annabelle hanging from the edge of her bunk bed eleven years ago, a Gucci belt wrapped tightly around her sixteen-year-old neck.
Hayden, only fourteen at the time, remembered being sat playing on his Nintendo 64 when he heard Dad’s wail from the top of the stairs. He remembered climbing the stairs and thinking Dad was just joking around or pretending to be a monster to scare Hayden like he always used to do.
But then Hayden remembered reaching the top of the stairs. Seeing his lovely, amazing big sister with the belt wrapped around her bruised neck, blue eyes wide and glistening with old tears, blonde hair so scraggy, way in contrast to the straightened and blow-dried delight it used to be.
He remembered seeing his dad on his knees and crying into the blue carpet.
He remembered hearing his mum asking what was happening from the bottom of the stairs. Turning around and looking at the
shock on her face.
He remembered wanting to tell her not to come upstairs. To stay away. To leave the house and never come back.
But she didn’t, of course. She went upstairs and the lives of the McCall family changed forever with another series of high-pitched wails.
Hayden heard the cry outside again. He wanted to just leave it, but there was something wrong about it. A curiosity made him want to go to the window and see what was happening. Maybe Terry had been hurt. Maybe he’d been in a car accident or he’d had a nasty fall.
Or maybe something much, much worse …
Hayden moved his wobbly legs out of the bed and lifted himself to his feet. His head spun as he got his balance, and every footstep sent more nausea through his tender body. He grabbed some old blue skinny jeans and a grey v-neck T-shirt from a dirty pile on the floor and pulled them on, and he stepped out of the confines of his stuffy bedroom.
When he stepped into the lounge, he heard the scream again and realised it was down the stairs and at his front door.
His heart pounded. He looked to the white curtains on the opposite side of the room, daylight peeking through them. He wanted to go and help whoever it was, but he also wanted to just stay inside. Keep his head in the sand. Pretend he hadn’t heard a thing, just like he wished he’d pretended he hadn’t heard Dad wailing eleven years ago when he found his dead daughter.
Curiosity had burned him one time too many in his twenty-five years. Inaction had done just fine for him to date.
He stepped over to the curtains, the carpet cool on his bare feet. He couldn’t hear his landlord at the door anymore, but he could still hear the shouts, the struggling.
The weirdest part about it was that usually, when someone was struggling, you’d expect another neighbour to go outside and check everything was okay.
But there was none of that. There were no other voices.
Just screaming, struggling, and something that sounded like … tearing?
Hayden stopped right in front of the curtains. He lifted a shaky hand and grabbed the edge of them to peek outside.
When he saw what was happening in the middle of the road, he puked.
Two
When Hayden saw the man being torn to pieces on the street, he was relieved he’d skipped breakfast.
Hayden stared out of the lounge window of his upstairs flat. He could taste burning acid from the boozy vomit he’d thrown up. It smelled bad too, as it stained the cream carpet at his feet.
But it didn’t matter. Not with what was happening on the street.
There was a bald man in a stripy white and green T-shirt. He was chubby, and sweat was dripping down his shiny head. He was lying in the middle of the quiet Wilmslow Road. He was squealing like a pig in an abattoir.
Two men and one woman were crouched beside him. Hayden couldn’t properly make out their faces from here, but he didn’t have to see their faces to know what they were doing.
One of the men had his face stuffed in an open wound in the screaming man’s belly.
The woman, with blonde hair, had her fingers wrapped tightly around the man’s left calf and was gnawing at his jeans. She sunk her teeth further and further into his flesh as he struggled to free himself, and then she pulled back, tearing a string of bloody muscle and tendon from his leg.
Another man, who looked old, judging by the bald, grey patch of hair on top of his flaky scalp, was holding the squealing man down and gnawing at his neck, the bites falling flat due to his lack of real teeth. But there were little piercings across the screaming man’s neck and bruising on his face where the old guy tried to bite him.
Hayden stood there, heart pounding, jaw shaking. He blinked. Rubbed his eyes. This couldn’t be real. He had to be asleep, still. Things like this didn’t happen in reality. And they certainly didn’t happen to him.
But when he opened his eyes again, he saw more tendon snap away from the squealing man’s left calf. He saw one of the attackers stretch the poor man’s intestines out with his teeth like he was a bird catching a worm for its young.
He saw the old man nibbling and nibbling at the squealing man’s face.
They were eating this man alive.
Hayden let go of the curtain and stepped back. He felt a damp warmth under his foot and he realised he’d stood in his sick. He backed further away from the front window. He couldn’t accept what he’d seen on the road outside. He could still hear the poor man’s screams, which were gradually getting weaker, but what he’d seen those three people doing to that man … it was savagery. It was the sort of thing he’d see after way too many bottles of Jack Daniels or a few doobies more than intended.
No. It was worse. It was real.
His heart pounded as he kept on stepping away from the curtain of his lounge. A sheer sense of dread coated itself around Hayden’s body. He’d seen a man being butchered outside. He’d seen it, and nobody else was doing a thing about it. He had to phone the police. He had to report it. Surely someone else had—someone else always reported crime.
But the man’s screams went on, fading away, as more tearing and squelching and bloody ripping echoed down Wilmslow Road.
The sound of that man being left to die and nobody doing a thing about it.
Hayden walked back into his bedroom. The smell of sweat and alcohol was strong in there, and the light peeking through the blinds still gave him a headache, but that was nothing. Nothing compared to what the poor bald man was going through outside.
He clambered over the bottles of empty booze and pills on the dusty carpet and grabbed his mobile with his shaking hand. He tried to hit in 999, but he kept on getting the numbers wrong. He took some deep breaths. Tried to calm himself, like all the self-help books recommended.
Deep breaths in.
The smell of vomit.
Short breath out.
Hayden finally got the three digits right and hovered his thumb over the “Call” button. He felt wrong calling the police about a serious crime. There was always guilt about calling the police. For some reason, we always have the impression in our heads that our problems are somehow less important to the police than somebody else’s. Dad was that way when Annabelle committed suicide. He shouted at Hayden’s mum. Told her to leave Annabelle in peace. Probably a denial thing, really. A way of handling the stress.
But right now, there was a man being butchered on the street outside.
Eaten alive.
He hit the “Call” button and brought the ringing phone to his ear.
As the dialling tone rumbled on, Hayden got a flash of a news story he’d seen before he went to sleep in the early hours. He’d just finished topping the night off with some GTA V on the fifty-inch telly in the lounge—also paid for by the state benefits. He’d flicked over to the rolling news channel and he’d seen something about a man chewing a woman’s face off in Scotland or someplace like that. It was all very “breaking news,” all very raw, but there was something about it that gave Hayden a distinctly bad feeling, even after all the drink he’d knocked back.
But cannibalism didn’t spread. This had to be unrelated.
Right?
“You have reached the emergency services. All our operators are currently busy. Please hold for a short while as we attempt to connect you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.”
Hayden frowned at the recorded female voice. He pulled the phone away and looked at it to see he’d definitely called 999 and not some sales company.
The three numbers were there. 999.
A recorded message thanking him for calling the emergency services.
Something definitely wasn’t right.
Hayden put the phone down and tried calling again. He listened to the dialling tone. Listened to the rings as they went on and on, felt the hope drifting from his body with every noise …
“You have reached the emergency services. All our operators are currently busy. Please hold for a short while as we attempt to connect you as soon as p
ossible. Thank you for your patience.”
Hayden waited for a few seconds, like he’d been instructed. He listened to the sound of the elevator music playing down the line, like something from a nightmare, haunting music that didn’t match up with the bald man’s screaming in any way …
And then his body froze.
He listened beyond the music on the phone.
Listened outside for a noise.
The man outside had stopped screaming.
Hayden lowered his phone. He kept on staring at the blinds of his bedroom window, listening outside for more screams, more tears, more whimpers.
And then he remembered Terry.
Terry, his landlord, banging at the front door.
It had definitely been Terry. Although Hayden wasn’t accustomed to hearing Terry so afraid, he could recognise that rent-demanding voice from a mile away.
Hayden stepped up to the blinds. He peeked outside. Terry’s old Y reg silver Vauxhall Astra was parked in number 27’s parking space. Which meant that he was definitely here.
But where was he?
And why had he gone quiet?
Hayden was in the middle of pondering this thought when he heard the front door of his flat click open.
Three
When Hayden heard the front door of his flat click open, he froze completely.
His heart picked up in pace. He held his phone tightly in his shaking hand, stared at the blinds at the back of his bedroom, unable to move. Almost inadvertently, he found himself straining to listen. Straining to hear what had stepped through the door. What was coming up the stairs …
The bald man outside on the road being savaged by those three people. His screams had stopped completely. The rest of Wilmslow Road was silent. There were no sounds of the occasional car speeding down the street, brakes screeching when they saw the speed bumps, always at the last possible moment. There was no forced chatter of dog walkers as they did all they could to subtly convince one another that they, in fact, were the superior dog whisperer.